Jump to navigation Skip to content
“If there are fewer stars now / than when I was a child, / I can’t say / which are missing, / who was the last to see them.” Maggie Smith’s poem “Small Shoes” is adapted into a short film by director Kate Dolan for Motionpoems. Smith is the author of the poetry collection Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017), the title poem of which went viral on social media after it was first published online in the literary journal Waxwing.
“What are you? Where are you from? / I say, California, / but that’s not what they are looking for...” This Motionpoems film is an adaptation of Tiana Clark’s poem “The Ayes Have It,” directed by Savanah Leaf and narrated by Malina Tirrell. Clark is the author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).
“Sit down, world / and relax / so you don’t have tornadoes.” Preschool Poets, an animated series codirected by Nancy Kangas and Josh Kun, collects poems written by preschool students in Columbus, Ohio, and matches them up with renowned animators. Animated by Stas Santimov, “Bullets” was written by Brayden and read by his classmate Miracle.
“Every time you choose wrong. Blame it on empire.” Gary Jackson’s poem “Tryouts” from his debut collection, Missing You, Metropolis (Graywolf Press, 2010), is animated by Victor Newman and narrated by Chuck Johnson for Motionpoems.
Holes in the Mountain is a poetry film by Kai Carlson-Wee, shot during a freight-hopping trip from Oakland, California to Portland, Oregon in 2014. Carlson-Wee’s debut poetry collection, Rail, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in April 2018.
In this animated short film, David Bell narrates his seven-sentence story, “The Investigation.” Bell is the director of Western Kentucky University’s MFA creative writing program and the author of the crime thriller novel Somebody’s Daughter (Berkley, 2018).
This short film, created by Manual Cinema in association with Crescendo Literary, uses puppetry to imagine the life of Gwendolyn Brooks and the inspiration for her poem “We Real Cool.” The film was produced by Poetry Foundation with the story by Eve Ewing and Nate Marshall, and music by Jamila Woods and Ayanna Woods. For more on Brooks, read “Grant Me a Voice, and Speaking Eyes” by Angela Jackson.
“A few years ago I used to tell myself I wanted to marry a cowboy.” In this short film produced by Park Pictures, director Alison Maclean adapts Lydia Davis’s short story about an English professor who fantasizes about a life of adventure. “The Professor” is included in Davis’s collection The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
“I sit down beside it and smell its imagination with Wolfvision clarity, then back to the document I go, wiser, I think, for the digression.” In his haunting, experimental short film “Wolfvision,” poet and filmmaker Nick Twemlow meditates on technology, loss, and unexplained phenomena. Twemlow’s second book of poetry, Attributed to the Harrow Painter (University of Iowa Press, 2017), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this animated short film by Phil Borst, which was commissioned by the Washington Post, Victoria Chang reads the conclusion of her poem “The Boss Calls Us at Home.” Chang’s fourth book of poetry, Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
