Latest video reviews
No Apologies by Dee Hood
A videopoem addressing the political moment we find ourselves in by experimental video artist Dee Hood, a professor emerita at Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, Florida.
It’s fascinating to me how didacticism, which might otherwise leach the poetry out of a poem on the page, can still hold lyrical power in a video, if paired with the right images and sounds: a good reason to reach for videopoetry rather than page-poetry when responding to current events.
[water] acknowledgement by Josh Corson
An author-made cine-poem (as he calls it) by Tampa, Florida-based writer and artist Josh Corson, “[water] acknowledgement stands witness to the history of phosphate mining in Florida.” It appears at the very end of TriQuarterly‘s Issue 167 (Winter & Spring 2025), where the description notes that
Corson’s editing and soundtrack pulse with hypnotic urgency. Cutting between images of storm water drainage, advertisements, archival footage, and aerial footage of industrialized landscapes or phosphate extraction, Corson’s pace evokes a racing heartbeat as indictments against companies like Mosaic accrue. At times, Corson superimposes images over one another, as if they’re various layers of mining sediment sifting to the surface of the frame. Fervent in its pace and messaging, [water] acknowledgement is a transfixing cinematic clarion call for environmental concern.
The description also includes an announcement about changing editorship:
Issue #167 brings with it some exciting changes in the video essay and cinepoetry realm of TriQuarterly. As the year turns and the journal welcomes Jess Masi into the position of Managing Editor, Sarah Minor will step away from her role as video editor after six years of curating and writing about video works at the journal. Jon Bresland served as the inaugural editor of our now ten-year old video section, which boasts an archive of over a hundred carefully selected video works. Bresland was succeeded by Kristen Radtke, then Sarah Minor, and in 2025 writer and film critic Hannah Bonner will join the TQ team to take over curation of what is now the longest running video section at an American literary magazine. We look forward to seeing how Bonner shapes this section and invites readers and writers to the screen in years to come. In this issue we present works by Caitlin Lenz, Lee Hodge, and Josh Corson.
Read the rest, and then browse the rest of the issue. With poetry film forming a bit of a passing fad for some other major literatry magazines over the past 15 years, it’s great to see TriQuarterly maintaining its commitment to a video section, and publishing really important works like this one.
Grapefruit Parts by Sandra Louise Dyas and LeAnn Erickson
A second film by old friends Sandy Dyas and LeAnne Erickson for The Serendipity Project, which we introduced with their earlier video, fuze. In the description on Vimeo, Dyas notes, “This collaboration was inspired by Yoko Ono and the serendipity of chance. It is our second chance operation/collaboration, both were inspired by Yoko Ono and her book “Grapefruit”.”
As in fuze, Erickson’s selection of images and Dyas’s selection of sound clips do seem to be in conversation—an uncanny effect, which I think says as much about the nature of collaboration between seasoned artists who know what they’re doing as it does about the nature of videopoetry. One thinks of the famous quote by Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
Most of us amateur video-makers quickly discover that random mixes of text, sound and images tend to result in little more than a vaguely poetic fog. One of the reasons that Dyas and Erickson don’t fall into that trap, I think, is because they deploy fairly limited vocabularies of images and words or phrases: poetry lives in rhythm and repetition. And viewers can be relied upon to fill in semantic gaps, because that’s basically what we’re doing all day long with snatches of overheard conversation and chance fragments of others’ lives, consciously or unconsciously looking for connective threads—and regularly stepping back to try to see larger patterns. Any good poet, whether for the page or the screen, understands this instinctively: you have to leave a certain number of gaps for the audience to fill or leap on their own. That’s how the poetry happens. And it’s definitely happening here.
Speech by the Leader on the Occasion of the Future by Jan Baeke and Public Thought
This 2020 videopoem by Public Thought with its lyrical and absurdist send-up of political discourse seemed like an excellent way to kick off the New Year. Dutch poet Jan Baeke and designer and media artist Alfred Marseille note in their description at Vimeo:
SPEECH BY THE LEADER ON THE OCCASION OF THE FUTURE presents images of speaking leaders in an outside world that ignores those images, along with the language and tone of political speeches and their poetic disruption in slogans and subtitles.
See the full text on the Public Thought website. From the notes:
Fragments and paraphrases in the text originating from the New Years Address to the Nation by Vladimir Putin, delivered on 31 December 2019, Tayyip Erdogan’s message on hanukkah, M.J. Cagumbay Tumamac’s poem “A Planned Brief Documentary on a Teenage Boy in a Badjao Village”, Bùi Chát’s poem “April”, Anne Carson’s “TV Men: Artaud”, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s essay “Shock and Blah: Offensive Postures in ‘Conceptual’ Poetry and the Traumatic Sublime”.
Audio and video fragments originating from the annual address to Russia’s Federal Assembly, by Vladimir Putin, delivered on 20 February 2019, the 2020 New Year’s speech by Xi Jinping, Speech by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – Democracy and Martyrs Rally, 8 August 2016, Speech by Kim Jong-un at the Inter-Korean summit, 19 September 2018, televised speech by Kim Jong-un, 1 January 2018, Boris Johnsons’s speech: “I share the optimism of President Trump”, 3 February 2020, Donald Trump Memorial Day speech at Fort McHenry, 25 May 2020, Victor Orban at government news conference, 10 January 2019.
fuze by Sandra Louise Dyas and LeAnn Erickson
An experimental film that showcases the role of the viewer in creating videopoetry. As Iowa City-based visual artist Sandra Louise Dyas explains in the Vimeo description, ‘”fuze” is a collaborative video created for Homegrown Stories that relies on chance and serendipity. LeAnn Erickson (video) and I (sound) worked separately, only knowing the length of the piece and its title.’
Homegrown Stories has been nurturing creative collaborations for many years. This year we were interested in creating a more hands-on collaborative project among our loyal and talented collaborators. We invited sound and image artists who have contributed great work in the past to take part in this year’s Homegrown Stories theme – The Serendipity Project.
Twelve individuals were formed into six collaborative pairs. The pair of artists selected a title for their video piece and a designated length. They then worked separately with one collaborator creating a soundtrack inspired by the title and the other creating a silent image track. At a designated time, these two separate tracks were combined.
Using collage, organic image, music as sound, and a variety of structural schemes, these collaborative videos reveal the random magic of Serendipity.
The Serendipity Project 2024
Other videos for the project that don’t include text in their soundtracks are still well worth watching, but the magic here lies in just how well elements of the text do complement the imagery, culminating in a shot of a horseshoe crab which, as an environmentalist knowing something of the plight of horseshoe crabs, I found quite moving.
We’ve shared Dyas’ work here before: her 2016 videopoem River Étude. LeAnn Erickson, a professor of film and video production at Temple University in Philadelphia, is new to Moving Poems. Here’s her website.
