Poetry film

We had the privilege of hosting the Poetry Film iteration of the North West Poetry and Poetics Network at Salford university yesterday, jointly organized with two other poets, Antony Rowland (Manchester Metropolitan) and Ursula Hurley (Salford). I was reminded once again of the potential for generosity, openness, enquiring exploration, humour, inventiveness and eagerness/readiness to connect in surprising ways of poets, here accompanied by the wideness of scope and attention to both overall structure and details of perspective that a filmmaker can bring.

Sharing their work were Dalia Neis, CJ Hamand, Sarah Tremlett (and Meriel Lland and others), Helen Mort, Michael Symmons Roberts (interviewed by Martin Kratz) and Tom Jenks.

A really successful day in which I was able to make contact/be reunited with a fellow climbing poet Helen Mort - her poetry film set on (or up) Stanage Edge and another underway in Greenland; and also experience the excitement of boredom while listening to Tom Jenks' fantastic performance of many 'Dull days', which often seemed to initiate or presage exciting events (does excitement require the blank scratchiness of boredom?), to a backtrack of 9 1/2 minutes of train spotting filmage. Sarah Tremlett gave a generous introduction to a range of poetry film from the cartoonic, to the collage, to cave art (Meriel Lland); and Martin Kratz teased out of Michael Symmons Roberts a very interesting assessment of docu-drama and the difficulties of combining the two, both in the case of poetry and not. Also wonderful were the discussions between and after sessions, in which again and again the emphasis lay on the textured and spatial complexity a conjunction of film and poetry can bring. I was conscious there were other poets there (Ursula Hurley and Antony Rowland for starters) who could have contributed and that we were also lucky to have performance specialist Jo Scott whose comment in the morning debate on the use of screenplay techniques in poetry from the perspective of the stage play script set me thinking all day.

However I was particularly proud of the representatives of Salford's postgraduate community, both for the quality of comments and questions they offered in the general discussions, and also for their presentations in the morning's postgraduate panel - Dalia Neis' expansive discussion of the filming of wind extended to a filmmaker's view of Ann Carson's work, providing for it an extraordinarily liberating perspective ... exhilarating; and CJ Hamand's 'Depthlessness' https://curtisjadepoetry.wordpress.com/2016/09/06/depthlessness/ could be described on a first view as performance poetry delivered over black and white shots of urban Manchester, but there are such complex undercurrents, both in the half-captured words of the background chatter (and preaching) in the sound track, and even more in the words fleetingly present on screen, seen as reflection in water, advertising slogan, broken sign, graffiti scribble we can read, and elements that could be scribbles but that we cannot read. I find my eye adjusting by the end of the film to search for writing / letters in all the visual images, an exciting and very curious experience. She's on to something here!