SELECTED REVIEWS
PUBLICATIONS
HORSE-WOMAN
‘Your text is unique and has a real ‘souffle poétique’ [poetic breath]. As much as the character of Prufrock cannot go forward, you have created a character who does succeed, evolving, escaping to overcome problems—accepting herself. Through perseverance, this horse-woman overcomes deceptions and is freed from the bonds that limited her. While a stream-of-consciousness work stands to be interpreted differently by each reader, J. Alfred Prufrock brings the work forward into the known territory of literary identity – brava!’ VALERIE LEBLANC and DANIEL H. DUGAS, (CA) Publishers, poets and videopoets, Basic Bruegel Editions, Moncton, Canada.
FRAME TO FRAMES : YOUR EYES FOLLOW II / CUADRO A CUADROS : TUS OJOS SIGUEN II
'What makes this collection so unique, besides the QR code-based format, is its emphasis on the ekphrastic videopoem. Just as Ana Segovia’s painting, “Huapango Torero,” serves as a filmmaker’s portal for new meanings, this anthology is likewise a portal as the reader is encouraged to move seamlessly between the page and streaming online content via QR codes. Not only is this collection truly innovative and collaborative in spirit, taken as a whole, the book reaffirms the contemporary relevance and ever-evolving nature of the ekphrastic as creative incitement and provocation. And while a curated program for a poetry film fest might be ephemeral or inaccessible for those not in attendance, this anthology brings the poetry film festival directly to the reader in a way that hasn’t quite been done before. The Spanish translations by Camilo Bosso also allow for transnational and transcultural dialogues between artists, poets, and filmmakers.'
PATRICIA KILLELEA, ((Xicana/IRL/US) Assistant Professor of English, Northern Michigan University, poet, poetry filmmaker, writer.
‘From Page to Screen and Back Again – a Conversation with Sarah Tremlett on Ekphrastic Poetry and inaugural publication from Poem Film Editions’. Interview by Patricia Killelea
Moving Poems Magazine, 17 August, 2024.
https://www.movingpoems.com/2024/08/from-page-to-screen-back-again-a-conversation-with-sarah-tremlett-on-ekphrastic-videopoetry-and-inaugural-publication-from-poemfilm-imprints/
‘This multimedia book which is fully bilingual is extremely impressive, and, I imagine, unique. For me, one of the frustrations of listening to poetry to watching video poems is how quickly the poem goes past your ears and eyes. So it is a joy to have the poems here in print, with stills from the films and links to the films, prefaced by that thoughtful introduction from Sarah. To be able to switch between the book and the films is a rich experience and not least to have the opportunity to rewatch the films after reading more about the filmmakers’ intentions and processes, and to be able to pause the films in order to savour the poems on the page. This is something I really enjoy doing and I always appreciate the opportunity to have the poem there on the screen.’ JANET LEES, The Making of Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow / Cuadro a Cuadros : Tus Ojos Siguen, a bilingual documentary on the project for REELpoetry April, 2024.
https://vimeo.com/929116208
THE POETICS OF POETRY FILM
‘Sarah, you have produced a book which gives a comprehensive and detailed overview of poetry film. It includes analysis of formal characteristics of the poetic in these types of films, as well as plenty of examples from practicing artists, both historical figures as well as contemporary makers. You have included interviews with selected artists and have given a us a comprehensive list of poetry film festivals and other platforms where such films can be shared or experienced. Your thoughtful selection of works by poetry filmmakers is rich and varied, it spans not only historical breadth but also covers varied countries, cultures and subjective standpoints. It includes people who call themselves poetry filmmakers, but also includes artists who may have not considered themselves belonging to such categories, at least not consciously. I imagine the wealth of material to consider must have been overwhelming. I was also struck by your statement of poetry films dealing with "things in process", examining and reconfiguring time.’
DR TEREZA STEHLIKOVA, (CZEC) ‘The Poetics of Poetry Film’
Tangible Territory Journal, ISSUE 4, September, 2022
https://tangibleterritory.art/journal/issue-4-content/poetics-of-poetry-film/
'Sarah Tremlett’s The Poetics of Poetry Film is a unique and extraordinary contribution to this vibrant field of expression. Her landmark volume elegantly articulates the conceptual foundations, language, grammar, and vocabulary of poetry film and its cognate forms; delivers a concise and incisive history of the genre, and introduces students, practitioners and scholars to the field’s contemporary pioneers, methods of making, and varied narrative forms. Laden with rich and provocative illustration and example, The Poetics of Poetry Film functions as Bible, Guide to the Perplexed, and indispensable reference, fluidly integrating interviews with and notes by forty contributors into a coherent and beautifully structured progression. This book—a wonder in its variety, complexity, and ambition—is a superb read.' MARC ZEGANS, (US) poet, poetry filmmaker, reviewer and immersive theatre artist.
'This is an encyclopaedic, groundbreaking manuscript on an area of film production that definitely needs more attention, and stands to be the book to surpass for quite some time; the author knows her territory intimately ... It is the most incisive and complete analysis of filmic poetry to date; it’s very diverse, includes women, minorities and transgender filmmakers, and Tremlett's descriptions of the films, and the intent of the filmmaker poets, and is both accessible and clearly written. This is a sharp, up to the minute manuscript on the bleeding edge of film criticism. ... A book exploding with dazzling, evocative images and trenchant analysis.' GWENDOLYN AUDREY FOSTER, (US) Willa Cather Professor of English & Film Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, USA.
'This is a gem of a book … It reads like an organic narrative, tracing the threads of origins and anatomises poetics and also provides a platform for makers to discuss motivations and cultural understandings. … One of the aspects of studying and making poetry films that excites me is the sense that this is a site under construction, a space I often think of as a landscape, that is rich in possibilities. The Poetics of Poetry Film helps us to read that landscape; it helps us to understand how it was formed, its features, its contours and what it needs to thrive, to sustain its fertility. So, for me it really is an essential guide and an industry bible for years to come’. DR MERIEL LLAND, (UK) writer, photographer and film-artist.
interview by Dr Meriel Lland, March, 2021, screened at:
9th International Video Poetry Festival, Athens, Lectures and Performance Zone
6 June, 2021. https://vimeo.com/547690329
‘I loved reading this book. The Poetics of Poetry Film is an amazing resource for scholars and everyone interested in contemporary poetry… It’s encyclopedic and it covers so many aspects of the form and related forms, part of its purpose is to bring out the diversity of poetry film and related works. …‘You quote Roman Jakobson … who had a notion of intersemiotic translation which isn’t to do with translation between different languages but different regimes of expression: a lyrical poem to a film or a story to a painting. You say there is no mistranslation of the poem to a film. To me that is so fascinating, the idea that whatever the film or filmmaker does as a translation of the poem, if that’s the way the poet and filmmaker are working, there is no landing point that could possibly be an error. Translation is always open in that sense, I found that really encouraging and generative for thinking about. The intersemiotic translation unlocks the translatability of poetry in these ways.’ DR REBECCA KOSICK, (US) Senior Lecturer in Translation and co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute in the School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol, UK. Publication launch The Bristol Poetry Institute, in collaboration with the Indisciplinary Poetics Research Cluster, online broadcast 21 April, 2021 YouTube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57_2EKWm2BE&list=UUMTMR5hGj_K8KA1bOGSYWQA&index=2&t=17s
and cited by Kosick in: ‘Late Twentieth-Century Intermedia Poetry in the Americas’
J. Bruhn et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality.
‘Such distinctions are evident when considering concrete poetry’s “appeal to
non-verbal communication” and its desire to break with a “merely temporalistic linear”
poetic structure (de Campos et al. 1965: 157, 156). Whereas early waves of
concrete poetry sought an immediacy of poetic perception akin to the way viewers
might take in a painting all at once, for video poetry, a linear experience of time on
the part of the viewer overlies even the most nonsequential or nonnarrative “content”
it might convey. In this way, video poetry returns the visual/spatial aspects of
concrete poetry to a tradition perhaps more temporally akin to literature or film
than to the visual or plastic arts. Yet this same fact can offer opportunities to the
intermedium of video poetry. As Tremlett explains, “what makes a poetry film so
unique is that the spatio-temporal visual surface or monstration, descending from the
graphic arts, is as powerful or more powerful than the sequential trajectory inherited
from the traditional dramatic film” (Tremlett 2021: 79). Thus, while a lengthened
temporality may seem to be restored from the perspective of visual poetry’s turn
toward video, from the perspective of film, poetry – particularly poetry related to the
visual arts – offers alternatives to the narrative sequentiality dominant in more
mainstream cinema.’ DR REBECCA KOSICK (2024). ‘Late Twentieth-Century Intermedia Poetry in the Americas’, Bruhn, J., Azcárate, A.LV., de Paiva Vieira, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp: 921–954. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28322-2_45
'Sarah Tremlett’s The Poetics of Poetry Film: Film Poetry, Videopoetry, Lyric Voice, Reflection offers a breathtaking range of glimpses at the historical flashpoints, formal anatomy, and major and minor contemporary makers and trends in what Tremlett alternately calls film poems and poetry film (and their sister, video poetry). [...] The book is impressively comprehensive in its representation and acknowledgment of the wide diversity of formal experiments and elements that constitute the history and present of “poetry film,”. [...] The Poetics of Poetry Film should serve as an important resource for scholars and filmmakers interested in contemporary aesthetic trends in this interdisciplinary field. It also offers an important archive of festivals and conferences on poetry film through its inclusion of interviews with festival organizers and writings by contemporary filmmakers working at the intersection of poetry and film.' REBECCA A. SHEEHAN, (US) Professor of Cinema Studies, California State UniversityGabr in Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind.
'The Poetics of Poetry Film functions as an extensive survey of the field of poetry film, film poetry, videopoetry and the many related methodologies. [...] Tremlett’s voice carries with it a level of authority due to her work as both a scholar on the subject as well as a practicing artist in network with the international collection of practitioners included in the volume. As a reference volume, instructors working with students through experimental forms could find many valuable resources. An inclusion of the leading poetry film festivals stands out as a great resource for filmmakers interested in sharing their own poetry films with a larger audience. The ideal audience for this book includes those interested in creating film poetry works who can explore other makers’ methods described in this book for inspiration. The volume is organised by topic and looking directly at the subheadings within each section reads as a toolbox for aspiring poetry filmmakers with examples of artists and works to direct the reader toward additional resources.' GABRIELLE MCNALLY, (US) Associate Professor of Digital Cinema, Northern Michigan University in Visual Studies
'An exhaustive study of Video Poetry by the remarkable Sarah Tremlett and over 40 contributors! I was fortunate enough to have read with Sarah at the Bury Text Festival and found her work to be amazing. She also appears in an issue of Ekleksographia edited by Judith Skillman. I recognize some names among the pioneers of the movement, including the Polypoet Enzo Minarelli. Congrats on this fantastic book! This is really wonderful!'
JESSE GLASS, (US) poet, artist, folklorist and Professor of American Literature at Meikai University, Japan. https://www.intellectbooks.com/the-poetics-of-poetry-film
‘Videopoesia – a necessary research’ [translated from Italian]
‘A very substantial and omniscient research like this one that I am about to comment on was necessary, since it had been missing from the publishing market for decades. To find something similar I have to go back a long way in time, I'm thinking of Vittorio Fagone's L'Immagine Video (Feltrinelli, a product that included Strauss or Prokofiev as a soundtrack!). … However, although these events [see article for list] were commendable and exhaustive, they placed video art at the centre of the video art galaxy, while Sarah Tremlett's powerful volume focuses solely on poetry in video and film …’
ENZO MINARELLI, (ITLY) ‘Videopoetry – a Necessary Research’ – Defining and Interpreting Verbal Symbols with Non-Verbal Symbols (From Jakobson to Sarah Tremlett) in JULIET, n. 206, February 2022, pp: 56–59
www.juliet-artmagazine.com
https://liberatedwords.com/2022/03/12/wonderful-review-of-the-poetics-of-poetry-film-in-juliet-art-magazine-by-enzo-minarelli/
POETRY FILMS
FLIGHT
‘Beautiful film, I love the manifestation and erasure of the lines in both images, the subtlety of the soundtrack, the opening achingly slow flyover, and the marvelously matched gradual superposition of the extract from paintings on the seascape. The elements join beautifully to make a resonant evolving piece of art journeying through time.’ MARC ZEGANS, (US) poet, poetry filmmaker, reviewer and educator.
SOME EVERYBODIES
… the formalists coined a term that introduced the concept of ostranenie, making strange, or as more popularly known, defamiliarization … Making something strange also required “making art difficult in order to heighten one’s perception” … In the work Some Everybodies, Sarah Tremlett trains her camera on a street corner but renders the scene and the sound in more than half speed slow motion. An everyday scene is instantly defamiliarized, voices become blurred, indiscernible. Narrative space is perceived as strange, compared to real time. (The effect is prolonged for the entire 16-minute length of the work.) TOM KONYVES, (CA) theorist and videopoet.
https://www.movingpoems.com/2024/11/ten-questions-for-tom-konyves/
VILLANELLE FOR ELIZABETH NOT OPHELIA
‘It’s taking that subject matter [abuse of women], but at the same time there is this act of resistance, I saw the red lips as a flag of resistance. It’s one and the same time both a giving in to that expectation to be a certain way and to not see the person but see the stereotype – what we have done to that subject – versus at the same time owning it. Taking it back.’
MARY MCDONALD (CA), poetry filmmaker and educator. Climate Change and Subjectivity,
Ian Gibbins, Mary McDonald and Sarah Tremlett in discussion with their related work, for REELpoetry, Houston, USA, April, 2023, https://vimeo.com/837576869
‘We have watched “Villanelle for Elizabeth not Ophelia” twice now. The opening, with the dripping water/water clock, and the closing with the vertical triptych, two parts still frames in the left and center, and the live action image on the right, revealed by the actress blinking and her sly look at the camera (loved that), bookend the film very nicely. Without the exegesis at the beginning, the film might risk the same opacity as the painting, when the film’s intention is quite the opposite, as the poem reminds us repeatedly: “the suicidal woman is not a vision to celebrate.” The instrumental and vocal music also works very well, underscoring the emotions evoked by the text, the images, and the poem, rather than relying on the music to tell the audience what they should feel, which is common in musical scores for conventional features and documentaries, as well as many poetry films. While this film is very different, it would pair nicely with Selfie with Marilyn, since both films reveal and unpack the social construction of female identity and representation, in this case the toxic trope of the “beautiful, romantic, helpless suicidal woman.” I like to think that the ending shows a woman breaking free from all that, coming up for air.’
PAMELA FALKENBERG, (US) activist video poet and writer, Outlier Moving Pictures (Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg). Email to Sarah Tremlett, 2021.
‘I am slightly speechless after seeing Villanelle for Elizabeth not Ophelia. Just beautiful, the cinematography, the choreography, the poem, the score.’ ANNA SAUNDERS, (UK), founder of Cheltenham Poetry Festival.
SELFIE WITH MARILYN
‘I felt its emotional impact immediately and I was hooked by the multiple ‘conversations’ taking place through time. The voices are many: Heidi, Hatti, you, the haunting dialogue within Heidi’s poem between Marilyn (as performance), Norma Jeane (as performance to a pre-Hollywood audience) and ‘meta-Marilyn’ (or is that Heidi as the speaker of the poem?) who observes her various selves in action...There’s a powerful sense of exploration and experimentation taking place in the piece – an extended improvisation … where open-minded flexibility has found a way to incorporate the discoveries made in the process of performing itself. The overt fictions – the express factitiousnesses – revealing unexpected ‘realities’. The structure of the piece refuses any fast or fixed apprehension of what it might be to perform ‘woman’. Is this part of a wider investigation of female identities – or gender and identities? And your phrase : ‘The desire to not be yourself ultimately begins to wear you out’ really chimes with me – and perhaps with our times. You describe Selfie with Marilyn, as a ‘quote within a quote exercise in representation’. As a writer and film poet fascinated by stories of women’s self-making or self-invention, I experienced this piece as a haunting palimpsest. Hatti, is a site under (self) construction encountering and ‘trying out’ ghost identities from another time …It seems to me that Hatti’s portraits/characters connect with Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills, History Portraits and her work with prosthetics/fake body parts. When Hatti channels Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jeane Baker they are exploring, not adopting … we are invited to glimpse the messy process of self-making – not the product. This is, after all, Selfie with Marilyn, not as Marilyn. Like all selfies, it is only ever part of the story. DR MERIEL LLAND, (UK) ecopoet, photographer, nature writer and film poet.
I’m delighted that Sarah Tremlett chose to make a film of my poem ‘Snapping a Selfie’. It is from my collection, which uses Marilyn Monroe as a trope for a poetic examination of our cultural obsessions and shared addictions. I’ve written extensively from a feminist place and wanted to apply that not only to Marilyn’s biography but to excavate celebrity culture ...
The poems have become a middle-of-the-night conversation between Marilyn and ‘I’ the poet, where it is not always clear which one of us is speaking. That blurring of speaker to me evokes not only the haze of insomnia and addiction, but also the blurring of boundaries created by our Internet celebrity culture. The film Selfie with Marilyn that Sarah Tremlett conceived, directed and produced captures the very essence of not only that poem, but the overall intention of my project. The blurring of Marilyn/not Marilyn, how the character is both in the act of becoming Marilyn and at the same time deconstructing Marilyn. It’s brilliant. Hatti is amazingly talented. I was really drawn to the Love magazine series. It captures the idea of transforming, putting on a ‘game face’ that Marilyn would do to become Marilyn. In Selfie with Marilyn she is also, at that moment, looking in the mirror and seeing her whole life and knowing how ephemeral it is; and yet we know how enduring she becomes. But in the poem, she is experiencing loss, fleetingness of time, youth, love, and yet knows she can put on lipstick and keep going.’ HEIDI SEABORN, (US) poet
‘… it was the built-in cut from persona to person that confirmed what had so moved me, which was Hatti’s off-camera glance to the script. By built-in cut from persona to person I mean the context of an acting rehearsal and performance, delivery or attempted delivery of lines – it was a good idea to present and leave the takes as takes whose integrity, of gender and identity, juxtaposed as they are with each other, is multiplied across the three screens. Interesting how we move fractured, fragmented, ever so slowly from the screen on the left, to the right, with sound overlapping (distancing effect notwithstanding) to the center, whose voice “mutes” the Marilyn/Hatti on either side, conferring a resolved “final” meaning to the performance ... Each glance off-camera is a shock to my system of understanding; she’s a Marilyn-Hatti hybrid that becomes Hatti when she glances aside. Rinse, repeat.
With each sidelong glance (by the performer) and interrupted “take” (by the filmmaker), the “poetry” of Heidi’s poem is ‘laid bare’; Hatti thwarts the illusion Marilyn, leaving Heidi’s words behind in the wake of ‘just another take”, which rings very true for me. It is clear that the center frame functions to recapture, reclaim, (redeem?) Heidi’s “poetry” after the opening false starts. For me, the false starts offer more “poetic experience” than the long reading by the center frame. Questions, questions. Why does the authority of the voice rest with the center rather than the right or the left?.’ TOM KONYVES, (CA) videopoet and theorist.
https://liberatedwords.com/2020/10/27/selfie-with-marilyn-in-zebra-2020-representation-who-makes-the-image/
‘In terms of how Hatti “aimed at being both Marilyn and both Marilyn and Hatti and sometimes failed, this seems particularly poignant given our ubiquitous struggle during the pandemic and even before to navigate that gap between our online selves and our actual lives and identities. And you’ve noted elsewhere that “Selfie with Marilyn” examines the tension in a subjective gaze—charting the shifting agency from viewer to viewed, or perhaps more accurately, playing with those ever-shifting power dynamics. And [ultimately] you say poetry film opens a “rich and vital creative channel for us all to voice who we are, not who we are told to be, whilst sending ethical messages which are pertinent and critical in contemporary life today”. This is a powerful aspiration, one that deeply resonates with the intentions of this journal, as well as my own practice.’ RITA MAE REESE, (US)
‘Making Marilyn: An Interview with Filmmaker Sarah Tremlett’ All Review, June, 2021
https://artlitlab.org/all-review/making-marilyn-an-interview-with-filmmaker-sarah-tremlett
SOUND AND CONCRETE VIDEO POEMS
‘In the case of the first film that really set me thinking and writing on my palm in the dark –Sarah Tremlett's Blanks in Discourse : 06 – both the visuals and the soundtrack felt as though they could have been anything. Text scrolled through an overlaid pattern while someone breathed in and exhaled over the soundtrack. But the text itself was interesting. It was apparently generated by typing randomly and then highlighting small sections in a different colour. This was bound to catch my attention being a process I discovered for myself a few years back with my piece title to go here - where a set amount of text was generated by typing randomly and then all words over three letters generated in the process were highlighted by making them bold. And yet seeing the text generated for this film - in blue with sections highlighted in red - added something to the result that I hadn't thought of before. It drew to my attention the way that computers and the internet - especially URLs but even beyond that - seem to be changing the limits of what's readable. Or perhaps more accurately what's writeable.’ MATT DALBY, SANTIAGO’S DEAD WASP, Poetry Film at Bury Festival of Text, 30 April, 2009. https://santiagosdeadwasp.blogspot.com/2009/04/poetry-film-at-bury-text-festival.html
Sound and Time – Three video poems by Sarah Tremlett: Mistaken Identity, She Seasons Contemplating Nature and Patterned Utterance, by ENZO MINARELLI [translated from the Italian].
‘The sound is indeed central in Sarah Tremlett’s videos which means she has achieved a full, mature conscience [sic] in the balance between the instruments of videopoetry.
MISTAKEN IDENTITY
In Mistaken Identity (Tremlett, 2005) https://vimeo.com/102637208 we read a series of expressions related to women as they appear in women’s magazines (‘the perfect orgasm lose weight/your man looks/lasting sex appeal/cellulite …’) in black writing, only the words ‘I’ and ‘home’ are red, emphasised by a hammering beep which shows all the contrasts between a free, independent woman and her supposed duties inside her own home. In one minute this video does more than many feminist demonstrations!
SHE, SEASONS, CONTEMPLATING NATURE
The method of presence/absence is rightly applied to other two videos produced by Sarah: She Seasons Contemplating Nature (Tremlett, 2011) https://vimeo.com/218596398 and Patterned Utterance II (Tremlett, 2006) https://vimeo.com/285082595. In the first one, a part of a newspaper article, is brought to the level of reading or unreading, by means of an astute use of slowly modulated focus. This is accompanied by a captivating sound – actual star sounds – at times very similar to the beating of a heart, that give us the flow of time reinforced by changing colours, a metonymical reference to the changing of the seasons.
PATTERNED UTTERANCE
In Patterned Utterance II, in front of us we have three fixed data screens, from a scanning probe microscope. As the microscope reads, so the black screens begin to scan in red (top to bottom) slowly unveiling the surface of a piece of silicon from three positions, showing changes in the scanning data. When the spoken word is heard, white lines appear on the screens. Here the game of revelation/unrevelation is given by the voice, who in the first part speaks clear statements like ‘the impossibility of making the same error twice’, ‘transforming / distributing / storing’ whereas in the second one, there is still the voice but the scan and the recording reverses; consequently, the meaning disappears. She Seasons (‘the sons of the sea, she sees the sons’) is a philosophical declaration about the flow of time, not only the seasons, the sons who grow, youth old age, but also the time to read, to understand, to accumulate knowledge. Patterned Utterance needs all its lasting eight minutes to reach the effect of listening/unlistening, even including the long pauses between the sentences or the words according to a precious rule introduced by John Cage: we need the silence to meditate inside ourselves the meaning of what we hear! Thanks to these two videos I can develop a meditation about time which is very important in videopoetry.’
ENZO MINARELLI, (ITLY), polypoet (author of the polypoetry manifesto), sound poet, performer, theorist. The Poetics of Poetry Film, Intellect Books, Bristol, UK, 2021, pp: 158–159.
For More Reviews please check Liberated Words.com and The Poetics of Poetry Film on this website.
PUBLICATIONS
HORSE-WOMAN
‘Your text is unique and has a real ‘souffle poétique’ [poetic breath]. As much as the character of Prufrock cannot go forward, you have created a character who does succeed, evolving, escaping to overcome problems—accepting herself. Through perseverance, this horse-woman overcomes deceptions and is freed from the bonds that limited her. While a stream-of-consciousness work stands to be interpreted differently by each reader, J. Alfred Prufrock brings the work forward into the known territory of literary identity – brava!’ VALERIE LEBLANC and DANIEL H. DUGAS, (CA) Publishers, poets and videopoets, Basic Bruegel Editions, Moncton, Canada.
FRAME TO FRAMES : YOUR EYES FOLLOW II / CUADRO A CUADROS : TUS OJOS SIGUEN II
'What makes this collection so unique, besides the QR code-based format, is its emphasis on the ekphrastic videopoem. Just as Ana Segovia’s painting, “Huapango Torero,” serves as a filmmaker’s portal for new meanings, this anthology is likewise a portal as the reader is encouraged to move seamlessly between the page and streaming online content via QR codes. Not only is this collection truly innovative and collaborative in spirit, taken as a whole, the book reaffirms the contemporary relevance and ever-evolving nature of the ekphrastic as creative incitement and provocation. And while a curated program for a poetry film fest might be ephemeral or inaccessible for those not in attendance, this anthology brings the poetry film festival directly to the reader in a way that hasn’t quite been done before. The Spanish translations by Camilo Bosso also allow for transnational and transcultural dialogues between artists, poets, and filmmakers.'
PATRICIA KILLELEA, ((Xicana/IRL/US) Assistant Professor of English, Northern Michigan University, poet, poetry filmmaker, writer.
‘From Page to Screen and Back Again – a Conversation with Sarah Tremlett on Ekphrastic Poetry and inaugural publication from Poem Film Editions’. Interview by Patricia Killelea
Moving Poems Magazine, 17 August, 2024.
https://www.movingpoems.com/2024/08/from-page-to-screen-back-again-a-conversation-with-sarah-tremlett-on-ekphrastic-videopoetry-and-inaugural-publication-from-poemfilm-imprints/
‘This multimedia book which is fully bilingual is extremely impressive, and, I imagine, unique. For me, one of the frustrations of listening to poetry to watching video poems is how quickly the poem goes past your ears and eyes. So it is a joy to have the poems here in print, with stills from the films and links to the films, prefaced by that thoughtful introduction from Sarah. To be able to switch between the book and the films is a rich experience and not least to have the opportunity to rewatch the films after reading more about the filmmakers’ intentions and processes, and to be able to pause the films in order to savour the poems on the page. This is something I really enjoy doing and I always appreciate the opportunity to have the poem there on the screen.’ JANET LEES, The Making of Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow / Cuadro a Cuadros : Tus Ojos Siguen, a bilingual documentary on the project for REELpoetry April, 2024.
https://vimeo.com/929116208
THE POETICS OF POETRY FILM
‘Sarah, you have produced a book which gives a comprehensive and detailed overview of poetry film. It includes analysis of formal characteristics of the poetic in these types of films, as well as plenty of examples from practicing artists, both historical figures as well as contemporary makers. You have included interviews with selected artists and have given a us a comprehensive list of poetry film festivals and other platforms where such films can be shared or experienced. Your thoughtful selection of works by poetry filmmakers is rich and varied, it spans not only historical breadth but also covers varied countries, cultures and subjective standpoints. It includes people who call themselves poetry filmmakers, but also includes artists who may have not considered themselves belonging to such categories, at least not consciously. I imagine the wealth of material to consider must have been overwhelming. I was also struck by your statement of poetry films dealing with "things in process", examining and reconfiguring time.’
DR TEREZA STEHLIKOVA, (CZEC) ‘The Poetics of Poetry Film’
Tangible Territory Journal, ISSUE 4, September, 2022
https://tangibleterritory.art/journal/issue-4-content/poetics-of-poetry-film/
'Sarah Tremlett’s The Poetics of Poetry Film is a unique and extraordinary contribution to this vibrant field of expression. Her landmark volume elegantly articulates the conceptual foundations, language, grammar, and vocabulary of poetry film and its cognate forms; delivers a concise and incisive history of the genre, and introduces students, practitioners and scholars to the field’s contemporary pioneers, methods of making, and varied narrative forms. Laden with rich and provocative illustration and example, The Poetics of Poetry Film functions as Bible, Guide to the Perplexed, and indispensable reference, fluidly integrating interviews with and notes by forty contributors into a coherent and beautifully structured progression. This book—a wonder in its variety, complexity, and ambition—is a superb read.' MARC ZEGANS, (US) poet, poetry filmmaker, reviewer and immersive theatre artist.
'This is an encyclopaedic, groundbreaking manuscript on an area of film production that definitely needs more attention, and stands to be the book to surpass for quite some time; the author knows her territory intimately ... It is the most incisive and complete analysis of filmic poetry to date; it’s very diverse, includes women, minorities and transgender filmmakers, and Tremlett's descriptions of the films, and the intent of the filmmaker poets, and is both accessible and clearly written. This is a sharp, up to the minute manuscript on the bleeding edge of film criticism. ... A book exploding with dazzling, evocative images and trenchant analysis.' GWENDOLYN AUDREY FOSTER, (US) Willa Cather Professor of English & Film Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, USA.
'This is a gem of a book … It reads like an organic narrative, tracing the threads of origins and anatomises poetics and also provides a platform for makers to discuss motivations and cultural understandings. … One of the aspects of studying and making poetry films that excites me is the sense that this is a site under construction, a space I often think of as a landscape, that is rich in possibilities. The Poetics of Poetry Film helps us to read that landscape; it helps us to understand how it was formed, its features, its contours and what it needs to thrive, to sustain its fertility. So, for me it really is an essential guide and an industry bible for years to come’. DR MERIEL LLAND, (UK) writer, photographer and film-artist.
interview by Dr Meriel Lland, March, 2021, screened at:
9th International Video Poetry Festival, Athens, Lectures and Performance Zone
6 June, 2021. https://vimeo.com/547690329
‘I loved reading this book. The Poetics of Poetry Film is an amazing resource for scholars and everyone interested in contemporary poetry… It’s encyclopedic and it covers so many aspects of the form and related forms, part of its purpose is to bring out the diversity of poetry film and related works. …‘You quote Roman Jakobson … who had a notion of intersemiotic translation which isn’t to do with translation between different languages but different regimes of expression: a lyrical poem to a film or a story to a painting. You say there is no mistranslation of the poem to a film. To me that is so fascinating, the idea that whatever the film or filmmaker does as a translation of the poem, if that’s the way the poet and filmmaker are working, there is no landing point that could possibly be an error. Translation is always open in that sense, I found that really encouraging and generative for thinking about. The intersemiotic translation unlocks the translatability of poetry in these ways.’ DR REBECCA KOSICK, (US) Senior Lecturer in Translation and co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute in the School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol, UK. Publication launch The Bristol Poetry Institute, in collaboration with the Indisciplinary Poetics Research Cluster, online broadcast 21 April, 2021 YouTube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57_2EKWm2BE&list=UUMTMR5hGj_K8KA1bOGSYWQA&index=2&t=17s
and cited by Kosick in: ‘Late Twentieth-Century Intermedia Poetry in the Americas’
J. Bruhn et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality.
‘Such distinctions are evident when considering concrete poetry’s “appeal to
non-verbal communication” and its desire to break with a “merely temporalistic linear”
poetic structure (de Campos et al. 1965: 157, 156). Whereas early waves of
concrete poetry sought an immediacy of poetic perception akin to the way viewers
might take in a painting all at once, for video poetry, a linear experience of time on
the part of the viewer overlies even the most nonsequential or nonnarrative “content”
it might convey. In this way, video poetry returns the visual/spatial aspects of
concrete poetry to a tradition perhaps more temporally akin to literature or film
than to the visual or plastic arts. Yet this same fact can offer opportunities to the
intermedium of video poetry. As Tremlett explains, “what makes a poetry film so
unique is that the spatio-temporal visual surface or monstration, descending from the
graphic arts, is as powerful or more powerful than the sequential trajectory inherited
from the traditional dramatic film” (Tremlett 2021: 79). Thus, while a lengthened
temporality may seem to be restored from the perspective of visual poetry’s turn
toward video, from the perspective of film, poetry – particularly poetry related to the
visual arts – offers alternatives to the narrative sequentiality dominant in more
mainstream cinema.’ DR REBECCA KOSICK (2024). ‘Late Twentieth-Century Intermedia Poetry in the Americas’, Bruhn, J., Azcárate, A.LV., de Paiva Vieira, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp: 921–954. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28322-2_45
'Sarah Tremlett’s The Poetics of Poetry Film: Film Poetry, Videopoetry, Lyric Voice, Reflection offers a breathtaking range of glimpses at the historical flashpoints, formal anatomy, and major and minor contemporary makers and trends in what Tremlett alternately calls film poems and poetry film (and their sister, video poetry). [...] The book is impressively comprehensive in its representation and acknowledgment of the wide diversity of formal experiments and elements that constitute the history and present of “poetry film,”. [...] The Poetics of Poetry Film should serve as an important resource for scholars and filmmakers interested in contemporary aesthetic trends in this interdisciplinary field. It also offers an important archive of festivals and conferences on poetry film through its inclusion of interviews with festival organizers and writings by contemporary filmmakers working at the intersection of poetry and film.' REBECCA A. SHEEHAN, (US) Professor of Cinema Studies, California State UniversityGabr in Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind.
'The Poetics of Poetry Film functions as an extensive survey of the field of poetry film, film poetry, videopoetry and the many related methodologies. [...] Tremlett’s voice carries with it a level of authority due to her work as both a scholar on the subject as well as a practicing artist in network with the international collection of practitioners included in the volume. As a reference volume, instructors working with students through experimental forms could find many valuable resources. An inclusion of the leading poetry film festivals stands out as a great resource for filmmakers interested in sharing their own poetry films with a larger audience. The ideal audience for this book includes those interested in creating film poetry works who can explore other makers’ methods described in this book for inspiration. The volume is organised by topic and looking directly at the subheadings within each section reads as a toolbox for aspiring poetry filmmakers with examples of artists and works to direct the reader toward additional resources.' GABRIELLE MCNALLY, (US) Associate Professor of Digital Cinema, Northern Michigan University in Visual Studies
'An exhaustive study of Video Poetry by the remarkable Sarah Tremlett and over 40 contributors! I was fortunate enough to have read with Sarah at the Bury Text Festival and found her work to be amazing. She also appears in an issue of Ekleksographia edited by Judith Skillman. I recognize some names among the pioneers of the movement, including the Polypoet Enzo Minarelli. Congrats on this fantastic book! This is really wonderful!'
JESSE GLASS, (US) poet, artist, folklorist and Professor of American Literature at Meikai University, Japan. https://www.intellectbooks.com/the-poetics-of-poetry-film
‘Videopoesia – a necessary research’ [translated from Italian]
‘A very substantial and omniscient research like this one that I am about to comment on was necessary, since it had been missing from the publishing market for decades. To find something similar I have to go back a long way in time, I'm thinking of Vittorio Fagone's L'Immagine Video (Feltrinelli, a product that included Strauss or Prokofiev as a soundtrack!). … However, although these events [see article for list] were commendable and exhaustive, they placed video art at the centre of the video art galaxy, while Sarah Tremlett's powerful volume focuses solely on poetry in video and film …’
ENZO MINARELLI, (ITLY) ‘Videopoetry – a Necessary Research’ – Defining and Interpreting Verbal Symbols with Non-Verbal Symbols (From Jakobson to Sarah Tremlett) in JULIET, n. 206, February 2022, pp: 56–59
www.juliet-artmagazine.com
https://liberatedwords.com/2022/03/12/wonderful-review-of-the-poetics-of-poetry-film-in-juliet-art-magazine-by-enzo-minarelli/
POETRY FILMS
FLIGHT
‘Beautiful film, I love the manifestation and erasure of the lines in both images, the subtlety of the soundtrack, the opening achingly slow flyover, and the marvelously matched gradual superposition of the extract from paintings on the seascape. The elements join beautifully to make a resonant evolving piece of art journeying through time.’ MARC ZEGANS, (US) poet, poetry filmmaker, reviewer and educator.
SOME EVERYBODIES
… the formalists coined a term that introduced the concept of ostranenie, making strange, or as more popularly known, defamiliarization … Making something strange also required “making art difficult in order to heighten one’s perception” … In the work Some Everybodies, Sarah Tremlett trains her camera on a street corner but renders the scene and the sound in more than half speed slow motion. An everyday scene is instantly defamiliarized, voices become blurred, indiscernible. Narrative space is perceived as strange, compared to real time. (The effect is prolonged for the entire 16-minute length of the work.) TOM KONYVES, (CA) theorist and videopoet.
https://www.movingpoems.com/2024/11/ten-questions-for-tom-konyves/
VILLANELLE FOR ELIZABETH NOT OPHELIA
‘It’s taking that subject matter [abuse of women], but at the same time there is this act of resistance, I saw the red lips as a flag of resistance. It’s one and the same time both a giving in to that expectation to be a certain way and to not see the person but see the stereotype – what we have done to that subject – versus at the same time owning it. Taking it back.’
MARY MCDONALD (CA), poetry filmmaker and educator. Climate Change and Subjectivity,
Ian Gibbins, Mary McDonald and Sarah Tremlett in discussion with their related work, for REELpoetry, Houston, USA, April, 2023, https://vimeo.com/837576869
‘We have watched “Villanelle for Elizabeth not Ophelia” twice now. The opening, with the dripping water/water clock, and the closing with the vertical triptych, two parts still frames in the left and center, and the live action image on the right, revealed by the actress blinking and her sly look at the camera (loved that), bookend the film very nicely. Without the exegesis at the beginning, the film might risk the same opacity as the painting, when the film’s intention is quite the opposite, as the poem reminds us repeatedly: “the suicidal woman is not a vision to celebrate.” The instrumental and vocal music also works very well, underscoring the emotions evoked by the text, the images, and the poem, rather than relying on the music to tell the audience what they should feel, which is common in musical scores for conventional features and documentaries, as well as many poetry films. While this film is very different, it would pair nicely with Selfie with Marilyn, since both films reveal and unpack the social construction of female identity and representation, in this case the toxic trope of the “beautiful, romantic, helpless suicidal woman.” I like to think that the ending shows a woman breaking free from all that, coming up for air.’
PAMELA FALKENBERG, (US) activist video poet and writer, Outlier Moving Pictures (Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg). Email to Sarah Tremlett, 2021.
‘I am slightly speechless after seeing Villanelle for Elizabeth not Ophelia. Just beautiful, the cinematography, the choreography, the poem, the score.’ ANNA SAUNDERS, (UK), founder of Cheltenham Poetry Festival.
SELFIE WITH MARILYN
‘I felt its emotional impact immediately and I was hooked by the multiple ‘conversations’ taking place through time. The voices are many: Heidi, Hatti, you, the haunting dialogue within Heidi’s poem between Marilyn (as performance), Norma Jeane (as performance to a pre-Hollywood audience) and ‘meta-Marilyn’ (or is that Heidi as the speaker of the poem?) who observes her various selves in action...There’s a powerful sense of exploration and experimentation taking place in the piece – an extended improvisation … where open-minded flexibility has found a way to incorporate the discoveries made in the process of performing itself. The overt fictions – the express factitiousnesses – revealing unexpected ‘realities’. The structure of the piece refuses any fast or fixed apprehension of what it might be to perform ‘woman’. Is this part of a wider investigation of female identities – or gender and identities? And your phrase : ‘The desire to not be yourself ultimately begins to wear you out’ really chimes with me – and perhaps with our times. You describe Selfie with Marilyn, as a ‘quote within a quote exercise in representation’. As a writer and film poet fascinated by stories of women’s self-making or self-invention, I experienced this piece as a haunting palimpsest. Hatti, is a site under (self) construction encountering and ‘trying out’ ghost identities from another time …It seems to me that Hatti’s portraits/characters connect with Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills, History Portraits and her work with prosthetics/fake body parts. When Hatti channels Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jeane Baker they are exploring, not adopting … we are invited to glimpse the messy process of self-making – not the product. This is, after all, Selfie with Marilyn, not as Marilyn. Like all selfies, it is only ever part of the story. DR MERIEL LLAND, (UK) ecopoet, photographer, nature writer and film poet.
I’m delighted that Sarah Tremlett chose to make a film of my poem ‘Snapping a Selfie’. It is from my collection, which uses Marilyn Monroe as a trope for a poetic examination of our cultural obsessions and shared addictions. I’ve written extensively from a feminist place and wanted to apply that not only to Marilyn’s biography but to excavate celebrity culture ...
The poems have become a middle-of-the-night conversation between Marilyn and ‘I’ the poet, where it is not always clear which one of us is speaking. That blurring of speaker to me evokes not only the haze of insomnia and addiction, but also the blurring of boundaries created by our Internet celebrity culture. The film Selfie with Marilyn that Sarah Tremlett conceived, directed and produced captures the very essence of not only that poem, but the overall intention of my project. The blurring of Marilyn/not Marilyn, how the character is both in the act of becoming Marilyn and at the same time deconstructing Marilyn. It’s brilliant. Hatti is amazingly talented. I was really drawn to the Love magazine series. It captures the idea of transforming, putting on a ‘game face’ that Marilyn would do to become Marilyn. In Selfie with Marilyn she is also, at that moment, looking in the mirror and seeing her whole life and knowing how ephemeral it is; and yet we know how enduring she becomes. But in the poem, she is experiencing loss, fleetingness of time, youth, love, and yet knows she can put on lipstick and keep going.’ HEIDI SEABORN, (US) poet
‘… it was the built-in cut from persona to person that confirmed what had so moved me, which was Hatti’s off-camera glance to the script. By built-in cut from persona to person I mean the context of an acting rehearsal and performance, delivery or attempted delivery of lines – it was a good idea to present and leave the takes as takes whose integrity, of gender and identity, juxtaposed as they are with each other, is multiplied across the three screens. Interesting how we move fractured, fragmented, ever so slowly from the screen on the left, to the right, with sound overlapping (distancing effect notwithstanding) to the center, whose voice “mutes” the Marilyn/Hatti on either side, conferring a resolved “final” meaning to the performance ... Each glance off-camera is a shock to my system of understanding; she’s a Marilyn-Hatti hybrid that becomes Hatti when she glances aside. Rinse, repeat.
With each sidelong glance (by the performer) and interrupted “take” (by the filmmaker), the “poetry” of Heidi’s poem is ‘laid bare’; Hatti thwarts the illusion Marilyn, leaving Heidi’s words behind in the wake of ‘just another take”, which rings very true for me. It is clear that the center frame functions to recapture, reclaim, (redeem?) Heidi’s “poetry” after the opening false starts. For me, the false starts offer more “poetic experience” than the long reading by the center frame. Questions, questions. Why does the authority of the voice rest with the center rather than the right or the left?.’ TOM KONYVES, (CA) videopoet and theorist.
https://liberatedwords.com/2020/10/27/selfie-with-marilyn-in-zebra-2020-representation-who-makes-the-image/
‘In terms of how Hatti “aimed at being both Marilyn and both Marilyn and Hatti and sometimes failed, this seems particularly poignant given our ubiquitous struggle during the pandemic and even before to navigate that gap between our online selves and our actual lives and identities. And you’ve noted elsewhere that “Selfie with Marilyn” examines the tension in a subjective gaze—charting the shifting agency from viewer to viewed, or perhaps more accurately, playing with those ever-shifting power dynamics. And [ultimately] you say poetry film opens a “rich and vital creative channel for us all to voice who we are, not who we are told to be, whilst sending ethical messages which are pertinent and critical in contemporary life today”. This is a powerful aspiration, one that deeply resonates with the intentions of this journal, as well as my own practice.’ RITA MAE REESE, (US)
‘Making Marilyn: An Interview with Filmmaker Sarah Tremlett’ All Review, June, 2021
https://artlitlab.org/all-review/making-marilyn-an-interview-with-filmmaker-sarah-tremlett
SOUND AND CONCRETE VIDEO POEMS
‘In the case of the first film that really set me thinking and writing on my palm in the dark –Sarah Tremlett's Blanks in Discourse : 06 – both the visuals and the soundtrack felt as though they could have been anything. Text scrolled through an overlaid pattern while someone breathed in and exhaled over the soundtrack. But the text itself was interesting. It was apparently generated by typing randomly and then highlighting small sections in a different colour. This was bound to catch my attention being a process I discovered for myself a few years back with my piece title to go here - where a set amount of text was generated by typing randomly and then all words over three letters generated in the process were highlighted by making them bold. And yet seeing the text generated for this film - in blue with sections highlighted in red - added something to the result that I hadn't thought of before. It drew to my attention the way that computers and the internet - especially URLs but even beyond that - seem to be changing the limits of what's readable. Or perhaps more accurately what's writeable.’ MATT DALBY, SANTIAGO’S DEAD WASP, Poetry Film at Bury Festival of Text, 30 April, 2009. https://santiagosdeadwasp.blogspot.com/2009/04/poetry-film-at-bury-text-festival.html
Sound and Time – Three video poems by Sarah Tremlett: Mistaken Identity, She Seasons Contemplating Nature and Patterned Utterance, by ENZO MINARELLI [translated from the Italian].
‘The sound is indeed central in Sarah Tremlett’s videos which means she has achieved a full, mature conscience [sic] in the balance between the instruments of videopoetry.
MISTAKEN IDENTITY
In Mistaken Identity (Tremlett, 2005) https://vimeo.com/102637208 we read a series of expressions related to women as they appear in women’s magazines (‘the perfect orgasm lose weight/your man looks/lasting sex appeal/cellulite …’) in black writing, only the words ‘I’ and ‘home’ are red, emphasised by a hammering beep which shows all the contrasts between a free, independent woman and her supposed duties inside her own home. In one minute this video does more than many feminist demonstrations!
SHE, SEASONS, CONTEMPLATING NATURE
The method of presence/absence is rightly applied to other two videos produced by Sarah: She Seasons Contemplating Nature (Tremlett, 2011) https://vimeo.com/218596398 and Patterned Utterance II (Tremlett, 2006) https://vimeo.com/285082595. In the first one, a part of a newspaper article, is brought to the level of reading or unreading, by means of an astute use of slowly modulated focus. This is accompanied by a captivating sound – actual star sounds – at times very similar to the beating of a heart, that give us the flow of time reinforced by changing colours, a metonymical reference to the changing of the seasons.
PATTERNED UTTERANCE
In Patterned Utterance II, in front of us we have three fixed data screens, from a scanning probe microscope. As the microscope reads, so the black screens begin to scan in red (top to bottom) slowly unveiling the surface of a piece of silicon from three positions, showing changes in the scanning data. When the spoken word is heard, white lines appear on the screens. Here the game of revelation/unrevelation is given by the voice, who in the first part speaks clear statements like ‘the impossibility of making the same error twice’, ‘transforming / distributing / storing’ whereas in the second one, there is still the voice but the scan and the recording reverses; consequently, the meaning disappears. She Seasons (‘the sons of the sea, she sees the sons’) is a philosophical declaration about the flow of time, not only the seasons, the sons who grow, youth old age, but also the time to read, to understand, to accumulate knowledge. Patterned Utterance needs all its lasting eight minutes to reach the effect of listening/unlistening, even including the long pauses between the sentences or the words according to a precious rule introduced by John Cage: we need the silence to meditate inside ourselves the meaning of what we hear! Thanks to these two videos I can develop a meditation about time which is very important in videopoetry.’
ENZO MINARELLI, (ITLY), polypoet (author of the polypoetry manifesto), sound poet, performer, theorist. The Poetics of Poetry Film, Intellect Books, Bristol, UK, 2021, pp: 158–159.
For More Reviews please check Liberated Words.com and The Poetics of Poetry Film on this website.