Morning Walk
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“My bones are happy / inside my skin; my fingers / are snapping.” Joyce Sutphen’s poem “Morning Walk” is featured in this Motionpoems short film directed by Zack Grant and starring Debra Magid.
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Theater video tags: Motionpoems
Fable
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“We hid in the trees and when we ran out of trees we hid in houses made out of trees and / when we / ran out of houses we hid in skyscrapers made out of steel and concrete...” This Motionpoems short film, featuring Jackson Holbert’s poem “Fable,” is directed by Žanete Skarule and stars Emma Bobrova Lourié.
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The Opened Field
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“Six boys, a calf’s tongue each, one task…” Dom Bury’s poem “The Opened Field,” which won the 2017 National Poetry Competition, is interpreted by filmmaker Helmie Stil for this Motionpoems film created in collaboration with the Poetry Society.
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Good Bones
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“Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine / in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways...” This Motionpoems short film by Anais LaRocca features Maggie Smith’s title poem from her third collection, Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017).
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On Lockdown
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“We are // more vulnerable / by far // than is realized / by even our // least sung, / furthest flung, // and most / compromised.” This Motionpoems short film directed by Calum Macdiarmid features a poem written by Motionpoems founder Todd Boss, the first in a series that specifically speaks to a pandemic-ridden world which was commissioned by the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Center for the Art of Medicine.
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I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast
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“It looked like a pancake, / but it was creation flattened out— / the fist of God on a head of wheat.” This Motionpoems short film, directed by Dan Sickles, features the titular poem from Melissa Studdard’s debut collection, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast (Saint Julian Press, 2014).
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South County
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“Each winter a new storm bent on our shoreline and damage / bloomed wild. When the neighbors left, we stayed / watching the seawall recede stone by stone.” Meghann Plunkett’s poem “South County” is featured in this Motionpoems short film directed by Kenneth Kegley.
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Cranes, Mafiosos and a Polaroid Camera
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“What streams of light might escape me and reveal / about the things I collect and hide...” This Motionpoems film directed by Tash Tung features Natalie Diaz’s poem “Cranes, Mafiosos and a Polaroid Camera,” which was first published in Spillway and will be included in her second collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in March 2020.
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The Transformation
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“It wasn’t fair that fish could see color, / and whales could not, but I was okay: I loved my new body. / I don’t know what kind of whale I was. In the ocean / there were no mirrors.” Emily Jungmin Yoon’s poem “The Transformation,” which appears in her debut collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018), has been adapted into a Motionpoems film directed by Malin Sandberg.
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I Come From the Fire City
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“I come from the fire city / fire came and licked up our houses, lapped them up like they were nothing / drank them like the last dribbling water...” This Motionpoems short film, directed by Daniel Daly and starring Khadija Shari, features Eve L. Ewing’s poem “I come from the fire city.” from her debut collection, Electric Arches (Haymarket Books, 2017).
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