Video Thrilled the Poetry Stars

When the Academy of American Poets launched National Poetry Month thirteen Aprils ago, the art form that the monthlong marketing frenzy focused on was relegated to the page, the stage, and, if one wanted to go high-tech, the CD. More than a decade later, poets are taking advantage of advances in video recording, editing software, and distribution channels to create an entirely new way to find readers.

Video poems by Aaron Fagan, Thylias Moss, Anne Carson, and other poets can be found on YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, Livingwriters.com, and other online venues. They are often made in collaboration with musicians and visual artists, and can feature voice-over narration or musical accompaniment alongside the visual interpretation of the poem's text. The ideal result is to give the reader, now a viewer, a new experience of poetry through sonic and visual layering. The effect is not unlike that of a music video—and given how the invention of that medium, with its unique point of access and presentation, brought a new audience to music, the video poem may be ushering a whole new demographic to poetry.

The sharing of video poems began sometime in 2005, when artists discovered YouTube as a tool through which they could easily distribute their work and reach a broad audience. Aaron Fagan, author of the poetry collection Garage (Salt Publishing, 2007), describes seeing an early video poem that "began with a line about standing in the kitchen slicing an orange, and sure enough the video showed someone standing in a kitchen slicing an orange. The literality seemed to be the pitfall this potential genre was falling into right out of the gate."

Collaborating with his friends, visual artists Jeffrey Schell and K. Erik Ino, Fagan made several videos for poems from Garage and tried to avoid such a literal approach. One of these videos, "My Entrepreneurial Spirit," features a collage of images, ranging from footage taken in a moving car to a woman walking on a rooftop, that cannot be explicitly traced back to the narrative of the poem but nonetheless add a rich texture of meaning. For Fagan, working with video is "yet another among many Hail Mary shots to get poetry some attention or readership," he says.

Finding a new readership for poetry is exactly what mtvU, a division of MTV Networks that broadcasts a twenty-four-hour television channel available on hundreds of college and university campuses across the United States, tried to do last year when it teamed up with the National Poetry Series to give a college student the opportunity to publish a book of poems with HarperCollins. The mtvU audience was also introduced to the work of John Ashbery through seventeen online videos that animated selected texts from some of the poet's most recognizable poems. While the result resembled a series of poetry commercials, the exposure for contemporary poetry was priceless.

With the array of digital devices available today, video poems can be downloaded and taken with reader-viewers everywhere they go. This is one reason why poet Thylias Moss uses iTunes, where she offers a video podcast called "Limited Fork." Moss has been making videos since late 2004 and believes that a poem is only "visiting" the page, as she says in her video "The Death of Depth." She is interested in "interacting visual systems and sound systems on multiple scales in multiple formats simultaneously." Her poems are an amalgam of photographs, text, moving images, and sound experiments that come together to form an intricate quilt. She actively promotes this mode of production in her poetry courses at the University of Michigan.

Another poet who seeks to imagine a new landscape of the poem is Anne Carson. In an interview with Canadian Literature published in 2003, Carson described her relation to words as visual: "It's not about the meaning of each individual word adding up to a proposition; it's about the way they interact with each other as daubs of meaning...as impressionist colors interact, daubs of paint."

Carson's multimedia performances in New York City over the past two years have seen her poems merge with dance, sculpture, and video. Last year she invited the poet Mark Bibbins to make a video from fragments of her texts for a performance titled "String Talks" at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. A video project about pronouns, "Possessive Used as Drink (Me)," in which Carson collaborates with Merce Cunningham dancers and video artist Sadie Wilcox, can also be found on YouTube.

Whether or not video is successful in broadening poetry's appeal remains to be seen, but what is certain is that the form a poem is expected to take is changing.

Alex Dimitrov is an MFA student in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. His video poems can be found on YouTube.