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“The street shines with / mannequins in rhinestone. We walk / as if just friends.” In this Ours Poetica video, Oliver Baez Bendorf reads Rane Arroyo’s poem “Details as Revelations.” For more Bendorf, read his installment of Ten Questions.
“Written in Moscow during the 1930s, this surreal blend of political satire, historical fiction, and occult mysticism has earned a legacy as one of the twentieth century’s greatest novels—and one of its strangest.” This TED-Ed lesson by Alex Gendler, directed by Adriatic Animation, depicts the premise of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita and the circumstances surrounding its writing and eventual publication in the 1960s.
“Tan speaks to anxieties that plague many immigrants, who often feel both alienated from their homeland and disconnected from their adopted country.” In this TED-Ed animated film, Sheila Marie Orfano breaks down the themes of Amy Tan’s first novel, The Joy Luck Club, and the lessons learned from the intergenerational relationships of the characters.
“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.
“Reading Borges, you might catch a glimpse of infinity too.” In this TED-Ed animated short film, the work of Jorge Luis Borges and the way his essays, poems, and stories helped pioneer the magical realism genre is explored by Ilan Stavans.
“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.
“Elephant on an orange line, underneath a yellow circle / meaning sun. / 6 green, vertical lines, with color all from the top / meaning flowers.” In this animated short film for the TED-Ed “There’s a Poem for That” series, Aracelis Girmay reads her poem “For Estefani Lora, Third Grade, Who Made Me a Card” from her collection Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007).
“The dark wood after the dark wood: the cold / after cold in April’s false November.” In this episode for the American Poem video series, Joseph Fasano travels to Alaska to meet local poets and reads Olena Kalytiak Davis’s poem “Corruptive,” as well as poems by John Haines and Mary Tallmountain.
“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.
“My mama’s tongue is a telegram from her mother / decorated with the coqui’s of el campo...” Denice Frohman reads her poem “Accents” for this animated TED-Ed short film directed by Kapwa and Robertino Zambrano.
