The ninth Athens International Video Poetry Festival is online this year opening on Sunday 6th of June, and then permanently accessible online. This is a major resource for everyone and anyone and I am very pleased that my interview with Dr Meriel Lland on The Poetics of Poetry Film is available in the Lectures and Performance Zone. Very honoured that the book will contribute to this brave and ambitious project across genres, to give open access education on the arts online. Exciting future ahead!
 https://filmpoetry.org/9th-international-video-poetry-festival/
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​JUNE
The Poetics of Poetry Film my interview on the book with Dr Meriel Lland will be online at the 9th International Video Poetry Festival, Athens, Sunday 6th June (see www.filmpoetry.org time tbc).
The link is here https://vimeo.com/521526072
 
Poetry Film – Getting Started
WIRRAL POETRY FESTIVAL Sunday 27th June 2021 from 3–4.30 PM, with poet Sarah Wimbush, young filmmaker Isobel Turner and Sarah Tremlett. An online discussion on how to begin making poetry films with advice and examples. https://wirralpoetryfestival.org.uk

 Liberated Words at LYRA festival will be hosting two poetry film screenings this year. The first one on Saturday 17th 12–1 BST is a joint curation by Lucy and myself, on the theme of Reconnections. Lucy has chosen to feature artists from the South West, covering subjects such as landscape, the body, our emotions in relation to the pandemic and I have chosen a selection on family history, mainly made during Lockdown. I am creating a family history poetry film site at Liberated Words and if you are interested in this subject please get in touch. Artists featured include: Kat Lyons, Rebecca Tantony, Helmie Stil, Helen Johnson, Edson Burton, Yvonne Reddick, Francesco Garbo, Pierluigi Muscolino, Sarah Wimbush and Sarah Tremlett. This is a free event but for tickets go to www.lyrafest.com
 
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The second event is The Poetics of Poetry Film interview with myself and Dr Rebecca Kosick of Bristol Poetry Institute 21st April 6–7 BST.
Bristol Poetry Institute, University of Bristol presents
In Conversation with Sarah Tremlett: The Poetics of Poetry Film
Date: Wednesday 21 April 2021
Price: Free
Time: 6:00 – 7:00pm
The Bristol Poetry Institute and Indisciplinary Poetics Research Cluster will host this conversation with Sarah Tremlett (co-director of Liberated Words) and Rebecca Kosick (co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute). The duo will discuss Tremlett’s forthcoming book, The Poetics of Poetry Film: Film Poetry, Videopoetry, Lyric Voice, Reflection. This event is free and open to all. For more information and to reserve your ticket, visit our Eventbrite page.
Tickets and registering are also available through www.lyrafest.com  in the other events section.
‘A ground-breaking, encyclopedic work,comprising nearly 400 pages, with multiple contributors … it explores the history and different types of poetry film, a must for students, researchers, poets, filmmakers, across the fields of media, filmmaking, literary and cultural studies, art and philosophy and sheds light on the fast-growing genre…’

Copies are already on sale with Amazon in the UK.  
https://www.intellectbooks.com/the-poetics-of-poetry-film
 

REELpoetry, Houston, 24-28 February. Online this year, REELpoetry was a wonderful event. At https://www.publicpoetry.net and directed by Fran Sanders the festival was available to view from all time zones. I was lucky enough to work with Mary McDonald on a project for the festival where we helped selected poets make poetry films from pre-chosen films and soundscapes. Fran also invited Mary and I to judge the competition entries with her, and it was a difficult choice but the results were as follows:
 
The judges’ prize went to “The '90s” by poet Kathleen Flenniken and filmmaker Elizabeth Flenniken. The poem is from "Post Romantic: Poems” by Kathleen Flenniken.
The audience award went to “#BlackLivesMatter” by Ijeoma "E&J" Eke.
The deconstructed film winner is “A Moving Portrait” by poet Linda Eve Diamond. The watercolor animation is by Matvey Rezenov, and the music is by simondsouza.
 
It was a big festival to organise and so well put together by Fran, David and Leila, I was very impressed. It was full to the brim of different events to watch online. Fran asked each of the presenters to give a 15-minute presentation of their work and I chose three very different poetry films: Lockdowning with short one-minute diary footage of the early days of lockdown; Selfie with Marilyn (much said elsewhere, except that the collection the poem is from has now won the PANK Books Prize for Poetry. It will be published on June 1st, Marilyn’s 95th birthday. Huge congratulations to Heidi! And also Tom Konvyes has had some interesting things to say about the film on Liberated Words.com). The final film Firewash is a poem and poetry film about a mediaeval mining ancestor, from my family history project Tree. Firewash, the poem, is in the forthcoming collection Earth Lines by Edinburgh Geological Society. The poem arose from a visit to an old site in Cornwall where my ancestor mined, and which fortuitously is now a farm shepherd's hut retreat. I stayed there during a gale and, aside from factual elements, I cannot really say where much of the poem came from.

I was also interviewed by Dr Meriel Lland on my forthcoming book The Poetics of Poetry Film, and the link for that is here

https://vimeo.com/521526072

Very pleased to say the Dadaist I Swallow with poem by Bristol City Poet Caleb Parkin will be screened as part of Lyrical Visions festival on the 9th of December.  This will be one of those rare occasions at the moment – a LIVE screening – because the event takes place in Titirangi, a suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. It sounds a fantastic and very special event to be part of – see their description below.
Lyrical Visions is an annual celebration of poetry film, animation and music. It’s the brainchild of film makers Martin Sercombe and Robin Kewell. Robin screens the very best of ‘art house’ cinema from Lopdell House in the bush clad Auckland suburb of Titirangi. Martin moved to Titirangi from Norwich, UK in 2014 and teaches film and animation at AUT Auckland and in community settings. The idea was to bring together Martin and Robin’s work with other local film makers, poets and students, in a format that includes some of the best international cinematic poetry. Each show combines live performances with video projections and single screen works. The fifth year’s programme will include a band of local musicians improvising live to projected films.
The events are sponsored by local businesses and SAE Institute, the school of audio, music and screen production based in Auckland.

For more information about the festival and Martin’s film work, please visit https://martinsercombe.com/lyrical-visions-2/
For more about the cinema screenings, see:
https://flickscinema.weebly.com/

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Liberated Words' www.liberatedwords.com latest article asks Who Creates the Image inspired by Selfie with Marilyn (poet Heidi Seaborn, performer Hatti Rees and filmmaker Sarah Tremlett) which I am really thrilled to say has been selected for this year’s ZEBRA, Berlin (19-22 November) and in Spanish for FOTOGENIA, Mexico City, 12–14 November – the festival selecting 'disruptive, avant-garde narratives'.   

​Sarah Tremlett, poet Heidi Seaborn and Dr Meriel Lland discuss Selfie with Marilyn, female (self)representation over the years, Hatti's exploration of personas and Sarah’s New Romantic identities. Non-binary artist Hatti Rees (who performs Marilyn rehearsing), is also currently in the exhibition Power to the Models alongside ten other outsider identities at The Stedelijk Museum, Breda where leading innovative artist, photographer and curator Jan Hoek has enabled the models to take control of their images and define themselves. Also big congratulations to Hatti on the release of her first song as XAiLA available on Spotify and other sites see www.hattirees.com. 
 
This discussion brought up many other subjects and certainly will be continuing. Just like to say how very grateful I am to the Visible Poetry Project who produced the film for their April (one film a day) National Poetry Month annual project. Here film-makers get to choose a poet and poem they would like to work with, and I happened to get very lucky!