2012 is a year of deep changes. Humanity suffers from electronic hiperconnection and natural hipoconnection (with Nature and with the Earth that we are part of). Due to these facts, serious and urgent issues about environment, climate and humans have been provoked. We support The Earth Summit 2012 Río +20 of United Nations that will deal all those issues. We must do something as poets, artists and human beings; we must rethink all these matters. That is why our IV International Festival of Videopoetry 2012 has as specific theme “For the Earth”; its purpose will be to become aware of the fact that We Are Earth.

If you’re on Facebook, there’s also an event page with the CFS. And do join the open group for the Visible Verse Festival, where Heather Haley shared this link and shares many other calls, not all of which get posted here.

How does climate change affect your habitat? Participating artists should respond to the brief and the theme of evidence of climate change. In researching a personal but informed response to the topic, dialogue/collaboration with scientists is encouraged. Using film as a medium, the complex issues at hand should be transformed into dynamic but simple audiovisual experiences with both popular and critical merit. The work may not be longer than 4 minutes. Brevity is strongly encouraged.

The original screening will be part of the COP 17 global climate summit in Durban, South Africa, 28 November – 9 December 2011, “as well as Johannesburg and Cape Town. Thereafter, selections of the programme will travel to international film festivals.” The deadline is coming up soon — September 20. See the Open Call for Films and Proposals for more information.

The International Literary Film Festival is scheduled to kick off in Brooklyn, New York in November, and thereafter to travel to Berlin, Leiden, and Cha-am, Thailand over the following 14 months. The organizer, Lee Bob Black, is looking for films in four categories: feature literary film (longer than 60 minutes), short literary film (shorter than 60 minutes), documentary film about literature (longer than 60 minutes), and documentary short film about literature (shorter than 60 minutes). The deadline is October 14. See the website for a submission form and additional details.

Do you have a group of three poems you’d like to have published as videopoems? They could be three of your own poems, a set of three separate-but-related poems by you and two other poets, or a set of three poems written collaboratively by two or more poets.

We are a trio of artists — Nic Sebastian, poet/reader; Kathy McTavish, musician; and Swoon, film-maker — who have come together to pioneer this novel method of poetry publication.

Flight, a videopoem based on a poem by Helen Vitoria, is an example of our collaboration.

To get a sense of how your videopoem triptych would look and sound after publication, visit Night Vision.

Send 3 to 5 poems in the body of an email to Nic at nic_sebastian at hotmail dot com or Swoon at swoonbildos at gmail dot com.

SEE THE VOICE – Visible Verse 10th Anniversary Celebration & Festival Call for Entries and Official Guidelines

Please send in your videopoem by Sept. 1, 2010.

• Visible Verse seeks videopoems, with a 15 minutes maximum duration.
• Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or -subtitled version is required for consideration. Videos may originate in any part of the world.
• Works will be judged by their innovation, cohesion and literary merit. The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
• Please, do not send documentaries as they are outside the featured genre.
• Videopoem producers should provide a brief bio, full name, and contact information in a cover letter. There is no official application form nor entry fee.

Send, at your own risk, videopoems and poetry films/preview copies (which cannot be returned) in DVD NTSC format to: VISIBLE VERSE c/o Pacific Cinémathèque, 200-1131 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2L7, Canada. Selected artists will be notified and receive a standard screening fee.
For more information, see below, or contact Heather Haley at: hshaley@emspace.com

In 1999 the Vancouver Videopoem Festival, the first of its kind in Canada, began as an effort of the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre, a non-profit literary arts organization dedicated to expanding the reach of poetry through new media with programs such as Telepoetics Vancouver and the Edgewise Café electronic magazine. The VVF became critically regarded owing to its progressive regard for spoken word in cinema, presenting poets both in performance and on the big screen. The audience could explore the merits and distinctions of poetry rendered in these two forms, stage and screen, sparking new dialogue as to the essential nature of poetry. The festival then built upon that foundation, with widened explorations into poetry cinema across national frontiers. They presented significant new works from Europe and the Americas, and continued to offer Canadian audiences a remarkably broad selection of new videopoems from their own country.

Pacific Cinémathèque has been the VVF’s partner since 2000 and throughout the dissolution of the Edgewise. Founder Heather Haley continues to provide a sustaining venue for the presentation of new and artistically significant videopoetry as host and curator of SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse. And owing to Vancouver’s strength in the film and television production industries, Haley has been able to cultivate critical interest between filmmakers and poets, with positive consequences for both.

To celebrate entering their second decade of showcasing videopoetry, Haley and the Pacific Cinémathèque are presenting two screenings this year as well as poetry performances, a panel discussion and an awards gala, Friday Nov. 19 and Saturday Nov. 20.

(I am having a difficult time finding annual or biannual festivals. Seems most are one-offs and it’s not always easy to find the year on the webpage. A lot of information out there is terribly outdated.)

On Monday and Tuesday I featured work that originally appeared in two different online periodicals for poetry animations, Blue’s Cruzio Cafe and Born Magazine. The editors of both sites, I gather, oversee the collaborations that result in the animations, with the expectation that poets will submit poems, not completed animations. Other on-going projects that match up poets with animators or filmmakers include Comma Film, MotionPoems.com, Synesthesia, Viral Verse Productions, and the Poetry Everywhere series from the Poetry Foundation and its filmmaker collaborators.

But how many journals or other online venues are looking for finished videopoems? I hope the following brief list only scratches the surface of what’s out there:

• The Continental Review (guidelines)
• Cordite (guidelines)
• drunken boat (guidelines — though details on multimedia submissions are scant)
• poems that GO (guidelines)
• qarrtsiluni (guidelines)
• Shape of a Box (guidelines — it’s not clear if or when they’ll resume publication, though)
• Verse Wisconsin (guidelines — see editor’s comment below for more)
• Viral Verse does consider submissions, according to the proprietor (see comment)

What am I missing? I’d be happy to put this list into a page if we can augment it a bit. Considering how easy it is to embed a video, there must be more online literary magazines that would consider video submissions. On the other hand, many if not most literary magazines want to be the first publisher of a piece, and that’s hard to claim for a video that’s been uploaded to a video-sharing site — and few publications will have the resources or know-how to host video themselves.