The Poetics of Other Media

Clive Holden, a Winnipeg poet and media artist, creates film-poems which have been screened at prestigious events including the London International Film Festival, the San Francisco Poetry Film and Video Festival, and the Berlin Poetry Film Awards. Mixed voices, street and train sounds create a music when combined with Holden's visual frames that crop, edit, and re-colour subjects through windows of Vancouver apartments, moving trains, automobiles, and camera lenses. "Smoke" examines the cultural and medical significance of tobacco use, and alludes to Mikhail Bakhtin's notorious habit of using his manuscripts to prepare cigarettes while interred in Siberia without rolling papers.