Was unamused, but not surprised, to learn that it is apparently impossible to submit any of this year's Continental Review contributions as nominations for The Pushcart Prize.The impediment is absurdly but also typically quotidian: editors' nominations for the Pushcart have to be sent on paper, and the organization is, it seems, little receptive of a DVD containing our 6 nominated pieces of video/concrete/visual poetry. Here is the official line:
The nominations may be any combination of poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot. We welcome translations, reprints and both traditional and experimental writing.Do we count then as 'literary whatnot'?
In any case, this is a tentative question to people like Mark Young, Crag Hill, Geof Huth, Nico Vassilakis: do visual and video poetries need a type of institutionalized recognition, at the level of the Small Presses? Should we ask the Pushcart to consider visual, video, digital and new media poetries, or is a new framework necessary? Do we not want to partake in these more established modes of legitimization? Perhaps there's already a vizpo award I'm unaware of? If so, do they accept digital/video/hyper work?
Also, The Continental Review attempts, in its fairly wide scope, to be inclusive both of "purer" forms of viz and video poetry - Nico Vassilakis, Spencer Selby, and soon Mark Young - as well as more recognizably straight-forward "poetry reading" experiences. Would be interesting to see to what extent these more straight-forward readings housed in the TCR archives would be considered "original publications": what is their status in the eyes of others? Are they first-time texts? Or Benjaminian reproductions?
2 comments:
You should submit to them every frame of the videos with subtitles. They'll appreciate the 10-lbs enveloppe, I'm sure.
Have you heard about this?
For its tenth edition (May 2009), the International Poetry Biennial is pleased to announce an International Media Poetry Contest.
Works considered "media poetry" are those that place contemporary technologies at the service of poetry, be it within the framework of a performance or in that of a recorded and projectable work. Among the many forms accepted are included videopoetry, digital poetry, multimedia poetry, sound poetry, interactive poetry, and poetic installations in physical space or on the Internet. Works that illustrate a poem will not be considered (these are works that use sound or images to represent or complement a poem, for example). There are no restrictions regarding the form or content of the media poems submitted.
It's not a Pushcart, but it seems worth looking into, maybe.
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