Matt Mullins’ videopoems have been a mainstay of this site since 2011, when I ran across his first one, Highway Coda, so it was fascinating to hear how he originally got into videopoetry and what he’s discovered along the way. He prepared this talk for the virtual-only portion of REELPoetry 2025, which ran from March 31 to April 9.
Matt has made a visually interesting presentation with overlays of the videos under discussion, and speaks fluently off-the-cuff (or from hidden notes, perhaps) rather than reading a prepared speech. The result is a real gift for students and scholars in the field, but more than that, I hope, an inspiration to other poets and filmmakers interested in upping their game.
I write poetry, I write fiction, I write screensplays, I am as I mentioned a musician, so I have this kind of unique skill-set. I’ve done a lot of film studies, I apprecite visual imagery, I appreciate visual composition, I appreciate sonic composition, I appreciate linguistic composition, and so back then, in 2010 or so, when I first stumbled upon this artform of videopoetry, I just kind of felt like I had found my home.
The Poetic Phonotheque is “a global archive preserving and sharing contemporary poetry through voice, film, and print,” based in Copenhagen, with several international partners, including Kultivera in Sweden, Write4Word in Wales, and ArsPoetica.US in the United States, where The Poetic Phonotheque is registered as a nonprofit organization. Their online archive of poetry films is turning into a valuable resource, growing each year with the winners in the poetry-film category from their annual Nature & Culture International Film Festival (which had flirted with a name-change to Resonans, which is how we previously listed it).
This festival focuses on the poetics of nature and environment, and takes place annually in Copenhagen, Denmark (with headquarters in Sweden and Finland for smaller features) as well as an online festival which is of free access at poeticphonotheque.com during the festival dates. […]
We invite you to submit your films on this important subject of environmental consciousness communicated through a poetic language, whether they’re animation, short film, poetry film, experimental, or documentaries. A focus on the NATURE & CULTURE (humanity’s connection with our environment) is encouraged.
Poetry films are invited to remain as part of the permanent video collection of the Poetic Phonotheque on our website and YouTube channel (ONLY FOR THE POETRY FILM CATEGORY). We encourage BIPOC and LGBTQ+ creators to submit their work.
Thanks to MP reader Adam Stone for the reminder to post this call. See our page of film festival links for other events we might be forgetting to promote.
Drumshanbo County Leitrim, Ireland, hosts an annual literary festival bringing together some of Ireland’s finest writers and poets to celebrate the written word. As part of this we host an annual Poetry Film competition open to filmmakers and poets from everywhere. Each year we have an evening where we screen the shortlisted films as part of the festival’s opening ceremony. Send your entries and come join us in this beautiful Lakelands town in August.
The films must have been made more recently than January 2023, and should not exceed ten minutes. June 30 is the deadline. Visit Film Freeway for all the rules and terms.
The upcoming International Video Poetry Festival in Athens looks to be a massive affair, with 97 films and 33 live performances from 43 countries, all free (with a suggested donation), on Friday 11 and Saturday 12 April at the Empros theater in Athens.
International Video Poetry Festival celebrates twelve years of creative collaboration with more than 2000 artists from 85 countries in general, a world of poetic visions for the benefit of humanity. Poetry, cinema, music and spoken word come together to communicate the inspiration, dreams, ideas and hopes of all of us. This year the festival hosts significant artists such as Capétte, Amanda Shea, J.Chambers and Mad Kate, among other top international performers of the spoken word scene. […]
The Institute for Experimental Arts founded the International Video Poetry Festival in 2011, introducing the art of Video Poetry to the Athenian audience for the first time. Inspired by the digital platform Moving Poems (USA), the festival has evolved into a dynamic international field of collaboration between artists from America, Asia, Europe, and Africa.
Through its Show Room Video Poetry Zone and Live Performance Zone, IVPF creates an open public space for all forms of contemporary visual poetry, spoken word performances, concerts, video art shows, workshops, and lectures.
A new film by Belgian artist and musician Marc Neys, AKA Swoon, deploying text-on-screen for a lesser-known poem by Wallace Stevens. Marc doesn’t make videopoems at anything like the rate he used to ten years ago, but it’s good to see that he hasn’t lost his touch! This one is in support of his latest album, Harmonium (for Wallace), which he calls, in part,
a tribute to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. This piano and keyboard-driven album invites listeners into 10 serene, introspective compositions where music and poetry intertwine seamlessly.
Each track on the album draws inspiration from a specific poem by Stevens, capturing the essence and depth of his literary work through nuanced and meditative compositions. With Harmonium (For Wallace), I pay homage to Stevens’ ability to evoke profound emotions and imagery, crafting a musical counterpart that is hopefully equally evocative.
Wallace Stevens’ poetry has always been a profound source of inspiration for me. This album is my way of honoring the beauty and complexity of his words.
Marc Neys has the distinction of having more videos in the Moving Poems archive than any other filmmaker. Browse the full collection here… or cut out the middleman and go straight to his Vimeo page.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Somehow we missed the opening-date announcement back in July, but poetry filmmakers still have until February 25 to submit to the 2025 festival. Here’s the call-out:
Through the Weimar Poetry Film Award the Literary Society of Thuringia and the Weimar Animation Club are looking for innovative poetry films.
The aim of the award is to improve the exchange between authors and filmmakers in Thuringia and Central Germany, to sharpen the perception of poetry in multimedia contexts, and to create more awareness for the experimental short film genre »poetry film«.
The competition is part of the Poetryfilmtage (International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia).
Filmmakers from any nation and of any age are welcome to participate with up to three short films of up to 10:00 mins, which explore the relation between film and written poetry in an innovative, straightforward way. Films that are produced before 2022 will not be considered.
The Weimar Poetry Film Award stands for an independent and competent awarding process. The jury is international and consists of three jurors with expertise in the fields of poetry, film production or criticism, and festival organization. The competition films are nominated by a program commission. During the festival, the jury selects the winners of the Jury Prizes in the categories »Best Animation« and »Best Real Film«. Both awards are endowed with € 1,200. A €250 audience prize will also be awarded by the cinema audience.
The competition »Weimar Poetry Film Award« is financed by the State Chancellery of Thuringia, the Sparkasse Mittelthüringen, and the City of Weimar.
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.
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.
