Moving Poems

The Peter Principle is “an epic work poem released in blog form each week” at thepeterprinciple.org, but it just occurred to me to check YouTube as well, where I found uploads from the author, Clayton Crosby, of five of his Flash animations converted to video form. These are all very basic typographic animations, and they’re not integrated with the audio on the blog, but it’s a very interesting project and I wanted to recognize it here. On the About page, he describes its origin as follows:

In 1968, Laurence J. Peter published The Peter Principle, which held the theory that “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” He reasoned that any employee who excelled at a particular job would be promoted up the corporate chain, and though the employee might adapt to the requirements of the new job, each promotion brought him closer to a job he couldn’t know how to do. Therefore, any employee is eventually promoted beyond his level of skill and competence.

I’ve been reading Homer, and have been putting a lot of thought into heroes and poetic forms. As a result, I’m exploring the tension between epic and lyric poetry – which is to say the narrative, the expressive and what falls between.

All of these poems are completed before or shortly after going to work.

I am also in awe of the website’s design. It has to be one of the coolest single-author poetry sites on the internet. Check it out.

Jeanette Seah and Daniel Nudds directed this “Final project from the VFS Digital Design Program” at the Vancouver Film School. I’m not sure how well the video fits the poem, but the animation is too gorgeous not to share.

Animation by John Eickholt for MotionPoems.com (see also their YouTube channel).

A splendid little animation, which Laen Sanches has also made available with French subtitles and without any subtitles. (The original is in Spanish, not in Catalan.) Ines Cuesta helped with the illustrations (and provides additional credits at the link).

Best bilingual poem ever? Well, maybe not, but the last line is perfect.

For background on Guevara, see the Poetry Foundation site.

A simple Flash animation experiment by Joseph Shopen. The translation is from Japanese Haiku, by Peter Beilenson. Sora was a disciple and traveling companion of Matsuo Bashô.

The first two stanzas of Dickinson’s poem as animated by Laura O’Brien and some collaborators (full credits at the end). The complete poem may be read at Poets.org.

Note to regular readers: I’m scaling back from five to four posts a week here (though some weeks I may still publish five posts if I happen to have the material). Locating good poetry videos is becoming a little more difficult now, and I am wary of turning what should be a joy into a chore.

Tamzin Forster’s animation for what she calls a love poem by Julian Daniel. This was the winner in the Best Poem Film category at the 2009 Version Film Fest in Manchester, UK.

I’m not always a big fan of typographic animations, but it’s a style that seems well-suited to cummings. The animator is TJ ODonnell.

An excerpt from the poem by Al Purdy, brought to life by Bruce Alcock and Global Mechanic.

A fluid, vibrant and kinetic riff on one of Al Purdy’s best-known poems, recalling the experimental, interpretive work of Norman McLaren. It’s not a literal adaptation, but something more free-associative that visually accompanies the text while staying true to the playful, erudite spirit of the poem and Al Purdy’s imagination. We used oil paint, acrylics, graphite, charcoal, wire, cut paper, a beer mug, linoleum, bottlecaps… you name it, we art-worked and animated it. Almost all the animation was done in-camera, except for a bit of compositing after the fact.