Star Bazancir and Carl Hedsved
Conversation, a film by Star Bazancir and Carl Hedsved, uses poem text by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
The Midwest Video Poetry Festival isn’t the first of its kind, but it is the first in Wisconsin, says festival director Genia Daniels. Conceived before the pandemic as an in-person event with screenings at the Arts + Literature Laboratory, the first Midwest Video Poetry Festival has migrated seamlessly to its new online viewing platform.
The festival, streaming Nov. 19 and 20, will feature 36 short video poems, 18 each day. These were chosen from more than 1,600 entries. Daniels was “beyond shocked” at the number of entries submitted. “We had 24 volunteer judges looking at them. We had to keep adding people.” Daniels says the jurors spent 172 hours reviewing submissions, and it wasn’t easy to cull it to just 36. “As you can imagine, it was a ton of work,” she says.
Video poetry festivals are not entirely new; Daniels calls the form “a niche genre” that started popping up about 10 or 15 years ago and has been gaining popularity ever since. The short films are not always complex. “You can create work with just your phone,” notes Daniels. This readily available technology “gives access to people who might not otherwise have it. You can create really interesting and meaningful work with just your cell phone.”
Daniels thinks that the combination of video and poetry “can breathe new life into the genre. Film is a modern art form, and poetry is one of the oldest, so I think it can give access to a younger generation, to spark interest in poetry — that’s what I’m hoping, that people can gain more appreciation of poetry than from just reading it.”
There are both single-creator videos and collaborations between visual artists and word-poets.
Natalie Cook, a UW-Madison alum, is both a poet and a filmmaker; her work in the fest is Backwards God. Madison poet Marilyn Annucci is also in the fest, in a collaboration with director Jeffrey Pohorski.
Some offerings are what Daniels calls “poetic videos” — visual work that is “poetic in nature” but doesn’t have a word-based poem as part of it. Others are adaptations of more well known poems that are in the public domain, animated or illustrated by the videomaker. That’s the case with This is Just to Say, a reimagining of the William Carlos Williams chestnut by filmmaker Joseph Puglisi.
Joseph Puglisi
This is Just to Say is a clever video adaptation by Joseph Puglisi of the William Carlos Williams poem of the same name.
“It’s a clever way to put a modern twist on an old classic,” says Daniels. Another, A Piano, directed by Kathryn Darnell, uses a work by Gertrude Stein.
These are not simply videos of poets standing in front of a podium reciting their works — the prototypical idea of a poetry reading — although Daniels says there are several spoken word performances. But even these have an “added visual dynamic. It’s not just someone reading their poem. There’s music or some atmosphere change that makes it more visually stimulating.”
After each night’s screening, there will be a Q&A with some of that night’s filmmakers and poets. The video poems have come from countries as far-flung as Australia, the Philippines, Argentina, Chile, Greece, Sweden, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Iran, India and Russia.
Daniels says she hopes the fest will provide a fresh opportunity for people who are tiring of indoor pandemic activities. “It’s something new for people to get excited about in terms of art, at least,” says Daniels. “Honestly, there could be more. I feel like we could have added two more days because we had so many good submissions.”
Screenings will take place at 7 p.m. each day via livestream on YouTube.
