Nationality: United States

Malecón/Miami by Leslie Sainz

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Cuban-American poet Leslie Sainz performs her poem in this 2023 film from The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, “Directed by Eric Felipe-Barkin and shot in Coconut Grove and Biscayne Island, Miami.” It’s one of ten films in a series called Read By Miami, produced in cooperation with O, Miami Poetry Festival, which runs throughout the month of April each year.

I Am Here by Porsche Veu

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Porsche Veu writes, directs and performs in I Am Here, an inspiring dance and music video on personal empowerment.

Porsche Veu aka The Poetic Activist is an unapologetic author, spoken word poet, speaker, educator, and artist of many talents from Oakland. (source)

Porsche uses her art to fight social injustice, empower women, youth, & the Black community, and advocate for mental & emotional health. (source)

The film was winner of the multimedia category in the Button Poetry Video Contest in 2022. The poem can be read on the page here.

Moment by Matt Dennison

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A new film by Marc Neys, with music of his own composition, for the poem ‘Moment’ by Matt Dennison. Marc used the U.S. Army’s footage of an atomic bomb test, leaning into the distressed quality of the film stock digitized by the Prelinger Archive.

If You Feel Terrible by Rebecca Wadlinger

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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.

Subtleties of Shanghai by Angela Kong

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A lovingly crafted, gentle and touching film set during lockdown, Subtleties of Shanghai is by Chinese-American writer and artist Angela Kong. It was a finalist in the 2023 Spoken Word Competition at The Artists Forum in New York, and winner of the international category in the 2022 Button Video Contest.

Angela Kong is a Chinese American writer and activist committed to social change and awareness through photography, videography, and spoken word addressing issues such as experiences of racism, injustice, and privilege. A 2017 graduate of Colorado College, Kong currently works and lives in Shanghai. (source)

cage-free by Donna Kuhn

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This unique and original video was uploaded just two weeks ago. Described as an “animation collage of dreams”, cage-free is by multi-media artist, Donna Kuhn. As well she is a sometime poet in an experimental vein, words written and fused with the audio-video elements. More about her creative work:

Donna Kuhn’s experimental videos incorporate poetry, datamoshing, slit scan, dance, digital and visual art, sound text poetry, speech synthesis, animation, hologram/3d and sound/music. (source)

The text in this video is made up of many single lines and phrases from dreams, written and spoken in different ways, describing places, events, situations, momentary impressions. The surreal juxtapositions between these dream fragments are sometimes humorous, or dark, strange, light, or ordinary. The visuals similarly seem like a stream of glitchy consciousness. As someone who is fascinated by dreams, I enjoyed the video for its shifting moods and intriguing surprises.

Donna Kuhn created all elements of this video. We have previously featured other of her videos here.

We Are All Drowned Out by Kimberly Reyes

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A sense of planetary emergency is vividly evoked here in a videopoem with the power and urgency of a feature film, co-directed by American poet Kimberly Reyes and Irish/Australian filmmaker Gary de Buit (Studio 8 Labs) with music by Aiden Guilfolye, and uploaded to YouTube two years ago with this description:

Made in Monaghan, Ireland by Studio 8 Labs with funding from the Irish Arts Council. First published on Poethead.

Visit Reyes’ website and scroll down for a bio, before checking out her other poetry films. It’s always encouraging to see ambitious, career-oriented poets getting into poetry film (as opposed to aging burnouts like me). Here’s how her bio begins:

Kimberly Reyes is an award-winning poet, essayist, popular culture critic, and visual culture scholar who began her career as a music and entertainment reporter. She transitioned to creative writing after receiving her Master of Arts from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2013 and has since been awarded grants, bursaries, fellowships, residencies and scholarships from the Poetry Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Academy of American Poets, Tin House Workshops, Culture Ireland, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, New York City Artist Corps, Miami Writers Institute, the Arts Council of Ireland, CantoMundo, Callaloo, Hambidge, Cave Canem, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Munster Literature Centre, Summer Literary Seminars in Kenya, the Prague Summer Program for Writers, the Community of Writers, and many other places.

Read the rest.

Only by Rebecca Foust

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A poetry film by interdisciplinary artist Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş based on the title poem of Rebecca Foust‘s seventh book, Only (Four Way Books, 2022). Kevin Martinez was the videographer. It was shot at Limantour Beach, California in April 2023.

The publisher’s description does make the book sound intriguing:

Urgent from the outset, Rebecca Foust’s ONLY insists that the only thing worth writing about is everything. Prompted to confront what she does not know, the speaker lists, “Null. All. What’s after death or before.” This book scales the cliff-face of adulthood, that paradoxical ascent in which the longer we live the less we know of life, in which we find that each of us is only ourselves and yet delicately interconnected with everyone, everything, else. These candid lyrics ponder our broken political systems, family (dys)function and parenting challenges, divergent and intersecting identities, the complexities of sexuality and gender, natural refuge and climate catastrophe, and in general what it means to be human in a world that sometimes feels as if it is approaching apocalypse. At the ledge of this abyss, however, Foust reminds us of the staggering beauty of life, the legacies of survival in the echoes of care that outlast us: “I came / to the canyon rim and saw // how best to carry you: I let the stone go.”

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

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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 by Marissa Davis

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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.