With a pitch-black sense of humour, If You Feel Terrible is the first poem from the book Terror, Terrible, Terrific by US poet Rebecca Wadlinger. A bio:
Rebecca Wadlinger was born in Pennsylvania, where she attended the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, and her doctorate in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Her poetry has appeared in publications like The Best New Poets anthology, Tin House, Ploughshares, and Mid-American Review, among others. (source)
This film of the poem is directed, illustrated, and animated by Nick Stokes.
I found the film in Judy Elfferich‘s outstanding Poetry in Motion section of the Dutch website ooteoote, where she has been publishing videopoetry since 2015.
Naomi Shihab Nye reads her own deep and beautiful poem Kindness in this excellent animated film by Ana Pérez López, a Spanish illustrator living in London. Sound and music are by Chris Heagle. The piece is from a series of poetry films produced by the On Being Project. Others from the series have previously been featured here at Moving Poems.
Singularity is a wonderful animated film from UK artist Lottie Kingslake and US poet Marissa Davis. Featuring a marvelous spoken and musical voice performance by the multi-talented Toshi Reagon, the film is a touching ode to life’s interconnections.
Produced by the On Being Project, it was also a part of Maria Popova‘s project The Universe in Verse.
The poem can be read towards the bottom of this page at Popova’s website The Marginalian.
Sonnet 66 is an animated film by Jamie MacDonald from a poem by Luke Kennard, commissioned by UK publishing and performance project Penned in the Margins.
The film was made to coincide with the launch of Kennard’s poetry collection Notes on the Sonnets, which went on to win the 2021 Forward Prize. A description of the collection:
Notes on the Sonnets… recasts Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party.
The writing in Sonnet 66 is witty and elusive, and the film animation is cleverly simple. The whole is amusing and compelling in its short duration.
Two other films by Jamie MacDonald have previously featured here at Moving Poems.
I love everything about this animation by Evan Bode, though the first time I watched I wasn’t completely sold on the high school-aged poet Mackenzie Duan’s voiceover. On second viewing, I changed my mind, discovering, as Bode evidently did, that a youthful lack of assertiveness can code as sincerity and a kind of wisdom when one absorbs it in the overall context of the sound design, the intense colors, and most importantly the gorgeous lines of poetry. The film was created for Season 4 of the literary magazine Counterclock‘s Patchwork: Film x Poetry project,
a nine-week interdisciplinary arts fellowship open to filmmakers and poets. Filmmakers and poets are paired together to create original film-poems, or short films inspired by poetry. In the first half of the fellowship, each poet works to produce an original poem informed by both their and their partner’s creative interests; in the second half of the fellowship, each filmmaker works with their partner to adapt their partner’s poem into a short film.
Visit the film’s page at Counterclock to read the poem and bios. Here’s a snippet from the former:
Behind us, the hills
slope in brushstrokes over a lake,
soft and washed out, like the placefires go after burning.
Our bodies become stations of lightwhen the sun dips.
I always tend to feel that poetry animations are best at their most abstract and minimalistic—depending on the poem, of course. This animation by Rachel McMahon AKA RaeRae won the audience award at the Liverpool Celtic Animation Festival. It’s a collaboration with Jean Maskell, “a multi-disciplinary artist and writer inspired by contemporary and historic social issues and the natural world,” who provided the voiceover and text: a poem “about the conflicting emotions of feeling a part of two countries.” Perhaps it is that sense of a provisional existence that makes the kind of tentative approach to the animation—lines drawn and undrawn on white space with a paper grain—such a good fit.
Gethsemane is one in an ongoing series of films from Jane Glennie, made in collaboration with fellow UK poet Toby Martinez de las Rivas, and Bulgarian sound artist Neda Milenova Mirova. This poem is from the collection Floodmeadow, published earlier in 2023 by Faber.
All films in the series take an experimental approach, including layered and truncated voices, gritty sound and music, and still images animated in darkly expressive ways. The three collaborators seem artistically well-matched, the writing, sound and film-making coherently meeting. Another highlight from the series is Psalm-for-the Sea, Little Sea-Psalm.
Jane Glennie currently has a solo exhibition happening over August and September in the Art at the ARB program of University of Cambridge. Gethsemane and the other films in the series form part of the exhibition, along with her award-winning
Because Goddess is Never Enough.
We have previously featured several other of her films here. In addition, Jane regularly posts about film festivals and more at Moving Poems Magazine.