“A showcase of visual poetry” by contemporary British poets — animations, poem-movies, some interactive and some just to watch unfolding on your screen.
This is a great collection of live poetry: performance videos from poets “dedicated to unobscurate intensely vivid subject manufactured compassionate language,” brought to the Net by the
Museum of American Poetics. Ginsberg, Snyder, Kerouac and Rexroth in the Beat Generation archive, Creeley, Sander, Waldman and more among the PostBeat Era videos.
A collection of short films pairing Billy Collins’ voice reading his own poems with animations made by various filmmakers — delightful!
Beau Blue’s got a new wrinkle in poetry video — his collection features animated avatars of the poets, sometimes paired with the text of the poem, always matched with the poet’s recorded voice. The clips include well-known and not-so-well-known poets from all over: Robert Bly, Kim Addonizio, Robinson Jeffers, Kenneth Patchen, Jack Foley, Jake Berry, Blue himself, and lots more.
Born Magazine is “an experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media” — resulting in more than 400 collaborations, many of which are poetry films or silent, interactive animated texts.
Poetry International Rotterdam is a truly international festival. On its Camera Poetica, you can see a great collection of short poetry films featuring poets from all over the world: Jaap Blonk, Robert Pinsky, Lidija Dimkovska, Che Qianzi, Sirkka Turkka....
Comma Film is a project in the north of England that puts filmmakers and writers together “leading to the adaptation of short, previously published texts... through a series of challenges and screenings.” The resulting short “poem-films” are quite good, streamed on the Web site.
“cyberpoetry, poetry that cannot be published in the traditional print media, poetry that moves in time and space, poetry that requires new ways of reading, poetry that allows interaction, poetry that is moving digital, aural, visual, and animated....” from Komninos Zervos.
Kurt Heintz’ multimedia poetic nexus at
e-poets.net features this
Videotheque archive of streaming poetry videos. Pack up your Realplayer and take yourself to the movies now — this is a great collection: Patricia Smith in “Chinese Cucumbers,” Quraysh Ali Lansana in “Passage,” Kent Foreman at the Woodlawn Tap and lots more.
The Favorite Poem site is filled with poetry movies, streaming videos of each favorite poem introduced and read by the person who chose it, from an Atlanta Little Leaguer (“Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer) to a San Jose anesthesiologist (“The Way of the Water Hyacinth” by Zawgee) to President Clinton (“Concord Hymn” by Ralph Waldo Emerson).
Gabrielle Bouliane’s Livepoets.com site has a collection of the best spoken word poets from around the country, video and audio files galore.
Billing itself as “video poetry for the masses,” Dave Bonta’s Moving Poems is a blog that collects videopoems from YouTube and all over the Web. “Video interpretations of poems are the main focus, but poetry readings, spoken word performances, and interviews with poets are also eligible for inclusion.”
Megan Sapnar and Ingrid Ankerson’s beautiful site was “created to unite words, design, sound and motion and to celebrate poetry through technology and the Internet.” It succeeds most wonderfully, with a large archive of Webvideo poems, links to
their inspirations and a large collection of links to
essays on new media poetry.
For National Poetry Month 2008, the Poetry Foundation sponsored this series of “short poetry films featuring poets reading their own work, animated interpretations of much-loved poems, and celebrities reading personal favorites, produced by WGBH and David Grubin Productions, and student filmmakers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s docUWM media center.” Great stuff — all streamed online.
Wayne Lindberg and Hilda Weiss have been videotaping poets at venues in the greater Los Angeles area since February 2007, and their video showcase includes hundreds of Southern California poets and poets visiting LA from all over. Each link on the site takes you directly to a YouTube video of a reading or interview, and they are continuing to add new videos every month.
A project of the Lempert Family Foundation, Poetry Matters Now is “roaming the big tent of American poetry,” making a feature documentary that will “present poetry in its abundant diversity, personified” and a series of shorts — readings, conversations and poet profiles, all available on the Poetry Matters Web site. Gerald Stern, Patricia Smith, Alicia Ostriker, Donald Hall, Anne Waldman...
As big’n’bold as ever, with tons of audio and video clips from the award-winning PBS series produced by Josh Blum and Bob Holman, directed by Mark Pellington.
USOP is a benchmark in poetry and media mix-it-up, lie back, cool heels in mouth, and engage the world as poem philosophy.
Mike Hazard, artist-in-residence at the Center for International Education in St. Paul, Minnesota, writes about making video poems and poetic videos even though they drive him crazy.
