When Seattle author Chelsea Werner-Jatzke started working with Northwest Film Forum to put together a video poetry festival, she recalls NWFF administrators saying that "it'll be really important to define what video poetry is." At the time, Werner-Jatzke recalls, she thought that would be "no problem." But as she worked to curate the month-long festival of screenings and educational programming, she realized that she couldn't easily define the form.

In fact, describing video poetry in words, she says, is really difficult. "It's not a poem that someone made into a video," Werner-Jatzke says. It's a lyrical video, a poem in moving images. Just as you can't throw a bunch of indents and hard returns into a wall of prose and call it poem, you can't just put some images of flowers onto a screen and say it's a video poem. "It's a relatively new art form, as far as writing genres go," she tells me, and there are debates among purists about how far the form can be stretched before it breaks.

Werner-Jatzke's journey into video poetry began about five years ago, when a fellowship at Jack Straw Gallery inspired her to incorporate multimedia work into her writing. "I hadn't set out to make a video poem when I started to make one," she explains. "I had a piece that needed to be a video piece. I guess I was trying to figure out how that fit into my larger writing identity, and that's how I became enmeshed in video poetry."

Tomorrow night, the final screening in the Cadence Video Poetry Festival is taking place at NWFF. In addition to video poems from all over the world, the screening will include new work produced in workshops over the past month at the festival by Northwest artists. Under the guidance of video artists like Gretchen Burger and poets including Nikkita Oliver and Shin Yu Pai, aspiring video poets have learned how to communicate in new media.

"I'm excited about seeing the workshop pieces, as a workshop participant as well as a producer of the festival," Cadence producer Rana San says. "It was cool to see how everybody took to the challenge. Filmmakers who hadn't had faith in their writing started writing, and writers were picking up the camera."

Werner-Jatzke is looking forward to "Triptych," a new work by Barrett White, and a film called "PoemVideo," which she says is "short and sweet, rooted in sound poetry and visually sort of simple in a wonderful way - some visual overlays but carried mostly by the delivery of the text and the music." She also says a new work created by Seattle poets Rachel Kessler, Sierra Nelson, and Britta Johnson will likely thrill audiences, and "Royaltee," by Kamari Bright, "incorporates text elements that add extra meaning to the spoken text she recites in unexpected and powerful ways."

But purists will continue to grumble: is a poem still a poem when it's in a video? Does poetry lose its essential poetry-ness when it's removed from the page? Werner-Jatzke recalls a moment that clarified that question for her at the Cadence festival kickoff screening earlier this month. "Nikkita Oliver pointed out that her writing is generally disembodied from the page," she says. As a spoken word poet, Oliver "doesn't draft on the page," and her poems often don't ever make it to paper. "I had to adjust my own framework" when Oliver said that, Werner-Jatzke says. "I think about literature as the written word, but literature is from a spoken tradition."

It's an enticing thought: If writing could shift in a relatively short amount of time from a spoken tradition to a written one, who's to say that the artists taking part in Cadence aren't helping along the next big evolutionary step?

Spider-Man's creepy first appearance, as drawn by the amazing Steve Ditko at @mopopseattle.

A post shared by The Seattle Review of Books (@seattlereviewof) on Apr 23, 2018 at 1:16pm PDT

In the Seattle Times last week, I wrote about MoPop's new Marvel: Universe of Superheroes exhibit, an ambitious world premiere of a museum show featuring original comics art drawn by titans of the industry including Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Byrne, and Frank Miller; statues of Marvel's superheroes; interactive exhibits; and paraphernalia from Marvel's movies, television shows, and cartoons. The show is huge - the largest ever assembled at MoPop - and it came together in record time for the institution.

To meet the deadline established by corporate synergy — presumably, this Friday's launch date of Avengers: Infinity War — MoPop assembled Universe of Superheroes in just under a year-about half as long as it takes to put together a typical show. To get a running start, the museum recruited University of Oregon Professor Ben Saunders as chief curator. Saunders tells me over the phone that U of O hired him to teach 16th and 17th century English - "my first book is on the poet John Donne, and I taught Shakespeare for many years" - but he's gradually insinuated his lifelong passion for comics into the curriculum. "I direct the comic studies minor" at the university, Saunders says, "which is, I believe, the first minor of its kind in the country."

In recent years, Saunders curated a series of popular comics art shows at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene. His exhibits began attracting national attention, and when MoPop reached out about hosting a show in conjunction with German touring exhibition company SC Exhibitions, Saunders says he considered the opportunity to "play with the extraordinary space and resources" of MoPop "kind of a dream."

This was Saunders's first show for a non-academic setting. Did he find it difficult to balance the corporate edicts of Marvel and the profit motive of SC Exhibitions with his serious love of the medium? "It's a genuine balancing act," Saunders admits. "There are a lot of factors that, as an academic, I don't usually have to think about - things like issues of brand assurance, for example."

Saunders says that Marvel wanted "to make sure that the audience is not going to get confused" by the many versions of characters on display. Of course, no curator of a mass-market exhibit wants their audiences to leave the museum more confused than when they went in. The solution to that particular concern was to do a good job of educating and clearly marking the exhibits. And Saunders managed that with Universe of Superheroes: previous or alternate iterations of long-running heroes - Carol Danvers as Ms. Marvel in the embarrassing 1970s bare-belly costume, for instance, or Jack Kirby's initial sketches of the Black Panther under the name Coal Tiger - are clearly marked as such.

Saunders says the process of reconciling corporate interests with historical importance wasn't a particularly difficult one. "Marvel understands what a museum is," he tells me. "They understand that this isn't about creating a walkthrough infomercial for current products. And frankly, I wouldn't have said yes to it if that's what I thought this was going to be. I would have no interest in doing that."

And Marvel has always had a strong relationship with its own past. "They understand that they have a history, and they're proud of that," Saunders says. Marvel has always self-mythologized its early days, even going so far as to draw Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the rest of the company's Bullpen into the comics.

Saunders says one of the secrets of putting a comics art show together is that you need collectors to loan the exhibit comic art from their collections. And "a good rule of thumb," he says, is "you don't want too many lenders. Because the more lenders you have, the more expensive [the exhibit] becomes."

Saunders realized this the hard way. "My first show had 19 different lenders," he says, "and I realized that was a mistake." Logistically, that's a lot of moving parts to track and a lot of personalities you have to keep happy. "What you really hope to do is track down people who are generous and willing to lend from their larger collections, and then, you don't have to go to 30 sources - you can go to between five and ten."

A little Star Trek joke John Byrne sketched onto a hidden part of the classic X-Men issue featuring the death of Jean Grey, also known as The Phoenix.

A post shared by The Seattle Review of Books (@seattlereviewof) on Apr 24, 2018 at 4:54pm PDT

One of Universe of Superheroes's major lenders is Dave Mandel, a lifelong collector of original comics art. Mandel is a comedy writer who has worked on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. He's currently a showrunner of HBO's incredible comedy Veep. "The show wouldn't be happening without him," Saunders says. "Most of the key X-Men pieces come from his collection. Dave has one of the best collections of original comic art on the west coast."

"I was always a comic book reader," Mandel tells me over the phone. "I still am to this day. I go every Wednesday to Golden Apple Comics here in LA. I'm a regular weekly reader still." Back when he was a teenager, Mandel says, he collected comics as an investment. "I thought everything I was buying was going to be worth a billion dollars someday."

"So I was buying multiple copies of issue one of whatever the new book was, like Team America," he laughs, remembering a 1982 Marvel flop about a super-powered team of motorcycle stunt riders. "Of course, that and a million dollars is worth a million dollars."

"I sort of bumped into [original comics art] by accident" at San Diego Comicon, Mandel says, "and I was just blown away by it."

To hear Mandel tell it, original comics art is the next step after the gateway drug that is collecting comics. "If I own Giant Size X-Men #1, then I have a copy and so do, I don't know, twenty thousand other people. Now, I might have a really nice copy - but so do three thousand people. But years later when I was able to purchase the cover of Giant Size X-Men #1, the original hand-drawn cover by Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum - which is also in the exhibit - that is the only one of its kind. It is the one. And that certainly appealed to my crazy collector genes."

Surely aesthetics played into it, too. What about the art appealed to him? "First of all, I think I'm a little bit of a frustrated artist," Mandel says. "So those who can't, collect." Additionally, "I love seeing the pages, seeing the notations where sometimes the writer would be talking to the artist on the sides, or a note from the artist to the inker, or the artist to the colorist, or even an editor's note." And the imperfections that don't make it to the printed page really appeal to him, too: "I love seeing the corrections, I love seeing traces of the pencils under the ink."

Mandel owns a lot of X-Men pages from the Chris Claremont era - "that X-Men run for me, that was my soap opera. I watched it the way a housewife watched General Hospital" - and Steve Ditko art. But he's not only a Marvel collector. "Just for the record, I do own Batman art. I do own Superman art. So if anyone's looking to do a big DC exhibit, call me."

An exhibit like Universe of Superheroes relies on the original artwork to give the show artistic merit, to remind audiences that this is not just intellectual property - it's real artwork drawn by real human hands. But in the future, original artwork is going to be harder to come by, as more and more artists work entirely on digital drawing tablets. Many comics artists today never put pen to paper as part of their process. "There's a wonderful artist that does a lot of work for Marvel these days by the name of Phil Noto," Mandel says. "And he basically is all digital, and I bug him about it all the time." Noto draws gorgeous covers and interior artwork, but those pages, to a collector, simply don't exist.

Mandel understands why the shift is happening. "I know some older artists that moved to digital because it's easier on their eyes. I know for other guys it can be quicker and faster. Also, a lot of guys they want to draw it, color it, and ink it - on a computer, all those steps are a lot quicker than doing them manually."

But he doesn't have to like it. "As a collector, especially with new stuff, I'll read something from time to time and really fall in love with some new book or new story and go, 'oh, who's this artist?' I'll reach out, and then I'll get disappointed: 'oh, there's no art.'"

Mandel is happy to share his collection of original comics art with the public through the Universe of Superheroes show, but he wonders what the next generation of curators will be able to show the public. He laughs: the all-digital drawing process "will make the sequel exhibit much harder, I guess."

Alison Luhrs (left in the above photo) and Amalia Larson (right) regularly perform an improv show called Book Club, in which they play a pair of "shallow, well-off adults discussing a book supplied by the audience while consuming a massive amount of wine." Their next performance is this Sunday, April 22nd at 5:30 pm at the Pocket Theater. In this interview, they discuss the books that they've most loved to riff on, the books they most love in real life, and what you should expect from Book Club if you've never attended in improv show before.

This is such a great idea for a show-I imagine getting good audience suggestions is one of the most tricky things about improv, so it seems like the books must help to focus the show. Could you explain the premise in your own words? And did this show's premise evolve, or did it come to you fully-formed?

ALISON: Book Club is about extraordinarily priviliged, trend-obsessed people with zero self-awareness trying to use literature to relate to their lives. We get a book from the audience, and the premise of the show is that we are the only two members who remembered to show up to their monthly book club meeting. We then crack open a bottle of wine (dry and slammable is our go-to) and pretend we've read the book before reading passages out loud. The passages serve as a launching-off point for the characters to talk about their lives and occasionally have profound revelations about the way they see the world. The book provides us thematic direction that always gives the characters something new to connect with. The women we play are sometimes secret shoplifters, sometimes cheating on their husbands, sometimes falling in love with each other, sometimes addicted to painkillers, but always contain a secret depth. They're the kind of people who use acai bowls and soulcycle classes to show the world how put-together they are when everything is falling apart.

The show concept originally came from Amalia and I making fun of trend-obsessed mommy bloggers, which quickly devolved into us revealing tragic backstories for imaginary people we were just making fun of. Seattle's Improv scene is having a real explosion of experimental unscripted theatre right now, and we've been performing together for ten years, so the show felt like it would be fun!

AMALIA: Yeah, the show itself has evolved some and obviously the content is different every time, but the premise has pretty much always stayed the same. As we were starting to really get into it riffing on this idea, we discovered that there is basically endless material to be found within the archetype of these vapid, secretly desperate, moneyed women. We could throw these characters into a slice-of-life type setting with just a suggestion for an idea from the audience and there would be plenty to run with (or Zumba with, or Kegel with, pick your poison), but having the addition of the book from the audience keeps the surprises coming in real-time for us and gives us a device to build tension, break it, give a moment a button or an ally-oop, and even lovingly throw each other under the bus once in a while. We've got to stay on our toes after all.

I used to run the book clubs at Elliott Bay Book Company, and it seems as though "book club ladies" are a relatively easy target for mockery. There are a ton of easy book club jokes in pop culture-mean-spirited jokes about rich white ladies who drink a lot and can barely read, which doesn't reflect the reality of book clubs as I know them. You play with these expectations but you don't come from a place of superiority. How do you manage to avoid the cliches and find something worthwhile to investigate in your characters? Have your relationships with the characters changed over time?

ALISON: The best part about comedy is being able to trick an audience into caring about someone they were just laughing at. Flipping the power structure not just onstage, but between how the audience views the subject. Our women are wealthy, fixated on appearances, but at their core are desperate for meaning and connection. One of my favorite devices we use in the show is that we allow for one or two 'drops' -- moments when one of the characters will have an honest-to-god deep thought, only to be broken out of the trance a moment later by the other woman purposefully changing the subject. It's totally uplifting and deflating at the same time, and is born entirely out of a character choosing to be introspective for possibly the first time in their life, all thanks to whatever text they were just reading a passage from. We adore these characters, and I think we can mock their pretentions without mocking their personhood. All people are worthwhile, even the ones you avoid when you go to Whole Foods.

AMALIA: I feel like those clichés are a gift! Everyone knows exactly the type of people these characters are referring to which makes it so fun to use the known aspects of the stereotype as a spring board. Moments of shallowness or obliviousness that play directly into the stereotype make people laugh because they feel spot-on or eyeroll-inducingly familiar, but moments that truly break the clichés and reveal something of more substance are disarming specifically because they are unexpected from these characters you thought you knew so well a minute ago. When the armor is polished to perfection, it's that much more surprising to find the cracks. Being aware of where we're playing in relation to those edges, I would say, is a huge part of the fun. But at the end of the day, the most important part is that it all comes from a place of love rather than ridicule. These women care so earnestly about who and what they care about, that's where the humanity lies, but what they care so much about is, you know, designer yoga mats and who brought the best snacks to the peewee lacrosse championship, that's where the comedy lies.

Have you ever belonged to a real book club? What books do you like to read?

ALISON: I make fantasy games for a living, so staying up on my SFF is important. I subscribe to Uncanny Magazine for SFF short stories, and survive otherwise on a steady stream of Tor novels. All that magic and wonder can be a bit overwhelming at times, though, so I also try to dabble in nonfiction to cleanse the palette. I recently finished The Only Harmless Great Thing (which if you like alt history with radioactive elephants is a real gem) and am about halfway through I'll be Gone in the Dark, so I'm sort of all over the place with my reading list.

AMALIA: Honestly, I read almost exclusively nonfiction, I'm kind of a creature of habit like that. My favorites are usually either research-driven social science - most recently Bonk by Mary Roach and The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, or personal essays and memoirs like Sloan Crosley and Augusten Burroughs and anything ever by any Sedaris. I try to keep up on the books my favorite comedy folks write too-the Oswalts and Poehlers and Martins of the world. It's good to have role models. And this show is the only book club I've ever been a part of so far, but I'd be down.

Do any books make repeat performances in the audience? Are there any books you maybe wish you could ban from the show, or that you've mined to the point of diminishing returns?

ALISON: We've never had a repeat book! We've done Starship Troopers, The Fish Won't Let Me Sleep, even a physics text originally written in Japanese and translated into English. With that last one we learned the hard way that academic texts don't necessarily make for funny passages.

AMALIA: I don't know though, we had that one really thick textbook from the seventies about family psychology and that was a pretty good one. I keep waiting for someone to bring in like a dictionary or a bible or phone book or something (they still do phone books, right?). I'm sure we'd make it work, but that would definitely be a curveball. It's more fun and we find weirder stuff when we just pick something arbitrarily and it turns out to be way out of left field.

What are some memorable books you've worked with? Is there a formula for choosing a good book to work with?

ALISON: The best ones are the weird ones. Fish Won't Let Me Sleep had a lot of passages about spawning patterns, which is just about the deepest well in comedy, so that was great.

AMALIA: Fish Won't Let Me Sleep, FOR SURE. I think if anything, the formula is just to not overthink it. If you just pick that random historical fiction novel your uncle gave you that one Christmas that you've never read, odds are good that's gonna be the real winner.

I recall being intimidated before I attended my first improv show. Do you have any advice for SRoB readers who are considering coming to your show who have maybe never attended an improv show before?

ALISON: There is nothing worse than invasive improv. Having a stranger demand you answer questions and possibly get onstage is THE WORST THING EVER, and it's okay to hate things that are invasive and terrible. A good performer will always ask, will never touch, and isn't going to bother you if you don't want to be bothered with. Volunteering a friend never works either -- that's always a cue for me to swoop up the obnoxious friend who did the pointing.

The good news is that you won't have to worry about that with our show! Seattle's please-don't-talk-to-me attitude applies to our improv scene, too, and the nice thing about improv in the Pacific Northwest is that in our theatrical community we like our shows to feel like plays (it's something that really sets our scene apart from the rest of the country). If we can make you forget we never memorized lines, we've succeeded. All you need to know if you see our show is that at the beginning we'll ask the audience if they would like to let us borrow a physical book for an hour. We'll collect the book, and then the show will start! And we'll never ask you a question again for the rest of the show! Hooray! A good rule of thumb in improv is that you don't need to yell unless someone on the stage asks the audience a question. We also recommend the audience buy some wine from the concession stand and drink along - it'll only make us funnier. Come expecting to watch a play, because that's what unscripted theatre is!

AMALIA: Yes to all of that so much. There is nothing worse than improv that tasks the audience with making the show funny or not. Being part of a show is great! Being part of a show against your will is awful. If you come to Book Club, you should feel kind of like you're just sitting in on a meeting of a real book club that just happens to be with the kind of people who know the difference between a decent fumé blanc and trash, and prioritize the health of their nail beds over real literary analysis or personal reflection. It's a really good time.