Jump to navigation Skip to content
“To me all good poetry is experimental in some way,” says poet Susan Howe in this film about Emily Dickinson by poet and filmmaker Benita Raphan, filmed on location at the Morgan Library & Museum and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Raphan, a Guggenheim fellow known for her short experimental films, died at the age of fifty-eight on January 10, 2021.
Watch this trailer for the Cadence: Video Poetry Festival, presented by Northwest Film Forum and programmed in collaboration with Seattle author Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and artist Rana San. The annual festival is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry held during National Poetry Month in April. Read more about the Seattle literary scene in our Seattle City Guide written by E. J. Koh.
“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.
“Butter lamp, incense stick, bees wax / votive, the occasion of poem, rites I enact…” In this video poem, Shin Yu Pai reimagines the traditional Wang Yeh Boat Burning Festival, a Taoist ritual, in the context of personal grief. Created in collaboration with filmmaker Scott Keva James, the short film was commissioned for the Ampersand Live showcase in Seattle. Pai is the final judge for Slippery Elm’s Deanna Tulley Multimedia Prize, which is open for submissions until September 30.
Public Poetry has released five video prompts, including this one of a stone skipping across water, for their REELpoetry film contest. Submissions are open through November 2020.
“You fill the pool with cough syrup, / and the hot tub with a thousand / hollowed-out cicada shells.” Noah Falck reads “Poem Excluding Modern Technology” from his new poetry collection, Exclusions (Tupelo Press, 2020), in this video poem directed by Kyle Marler with sound by Benjamin Jura.
“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).
“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.
“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).
“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.
