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.
Director Helmie Stil calls this “A poetry film about the feeling of isolation, struggle and being unseen.” A woman holds, releases and inhabits her breath underwater until she begins to seem less substantial than her suit of bubbles. The often-eerie similarity between Dutch and English is exploited to full effect, as the words on the screen meet their whispered counterparts for an effect at once intimate and menacing, especially as violence is described but not shown, and the viewer struggles to interpret the actress’s struggle: Is she swimming or drowning?
The poem is by Dutch spoken-word artist Sjaan Flikweert, and a final line of text, which appears after the poem seems to be done, reads, “1 in every 5 women endures domestic violence.” Then the title appears, this time to translate not a spoken Dutch word but only a sharply indrawn breath. A stand-out videopoem.
Poetry filmmaker Charles Olsen is inviting international poetry filmmakers to help mark the 10th anniversary of a project he’s spearheaded called Given Words. As he explains in the CFW,
Given Words is a poetry competition run by me—artist, writer and poetry filmmaker Charles Olsen—for Aotearoa New Zealand’s National Poetry Day in August. Each year I present five words and poets (New Zealand citizens and residents, both adults and children) write poems including all five words. I have also been a judge of the Aotearoa Poetry Film Festival (2023) and the ekphrastic poetry film competition Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow (2022).
In the last three editions, the five words have been presented in ‘word videos’ made by students in Honduras, Spain, and Aotearoa New Zealand.
Here’s an example of a given words video from López de Arenas Secondary School, Marchena, Spain, used for the 2023 competition:
For the tenth edition of Given Words I would like to invite poetry filmmakers from around the word to collaborate by contributing very short—from 5- up to 20-second—’word films’, from which I will choose five to inspire the poets of the 10th edition of Given Words. My reason for asking established poetry filmmakers is I would like to use this platform to both demonstrate the possibilities of the audiovisual medium, and hopefully inspire experimentation, as well as young future poet-filmmakers.
In a way it is breaking down poetry film into its most basic element: how to convey a single word through moving image and sound. In selecting the five word films I will consider the poetic nature and originality of each piece, alongside the final combination of the five words.
What will you get out of this?
There are no prizes or laurels or festival screenings. If chosen, your word film will help to inspire around 250 poems by adults and children across Aotearoa New Zealand next National Poetry Day in August 2025. It is an opportunity to be part of this innovative project, and may also get you questioning the relationship between text, sound and image in your own work. You should also have fun!
I have run Given Words for nine years with prizes donated by New Zealand publishers, and a minimal seed fund towards judging fees. No fee is asked of participants, and many schools across Aotearoa New Zealand invite their students to take part. We will promote the results and the winner’s profiles on our social networks during the National Poetry Day celebrations.
Guidelines
Make a film that presents one word in an original poetic way. The word must be present visually, or in audio, or both.
Each film should be less than 20 seconds long.
You can choose any word. We usually choose a mix of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Words in languages other than English will need to be accompanied by the English translation.
You can submit as many word films as you like, although for the five words we will only choose one per filmmaker.
You may submit clips of your previous work if it fits the guidelines.
Please do not include credits or logos.
Submission is free.
By submitting you acknowledge that the work is yours, and that you have obtained permission(s) where required.
Email your word film, preferably as .MOV or .MP4, to nzgivenwords@gmail.com by 28 February 2025.
Include your full name, a brief bio (up to 80 words), links to your social media and website, and an English translation of the word where necessary.
By submitting your work you allow us to crop and edit the work, and present the work online. We will include the credit of your work.
Any questions can be addressed to Charles at nzgivenwords@gmail.com.
Click through to watch more videos from the project and check out the winning poems that these videos have inspired. It’s interesting to see videopoetry being used to spark further poems. That’s kind of as it should be, I think. Let’s end with the 2024 Given Words video:
Large language models (LLMs) as deployed by OpenAI, Google, Meta, IBM, and other corporations are straining our energy infrastructure, putting technical writers out of work, and sparking lawsuits over perceived infringements on intellectual property rights. To many of us, this seems like a boondoggle pushed by techno-utopian fanatics obsessed with their end-time fantasy of a Singularity. For a poet to go up against it seems quixotic, to say the least. Why engage with AI at all?
This is a fascinating question. Short answer: we are beyond choosing to not engage. The internet and social media began this way. People dismissed both as fads or flat-out refused to participate, therefore dismissing any opportunity to have a voice in how either would play a part in our lives. We allowed big tech to dictate to — and sell us (literally selling us) — these technologies, thus, both ubiquitously seeped into the fabric of daily life. Because of this, we were unable to gain any footing in the narrative (too little, too late).
Big picture: AI would not exist without humans / human intelligence. Humans created, raised, and fed it on our collective knowledge and ignorance. It seems most rational to me that poets are the sole group to claim the narrative regarding this technology (as comedians have with politics, using satire, for example). What better group than those who wield language and thought, bending both to our will in a format / form that can never be fully defined? In my view, poets (as well as visual artists and filmmakers) are the voice of humans in this space, because we continue to defy expectations and perhaps most fully represent the expanse and uniqueness of creativity. While our collective experiences are similar, our subjective ones still remain authentic to each of us. LLMs can only regurgitate what is currently available to ingest. We haven’t reached singularity nor does AI currently have the capacity to read dreams, the human mind, or individual thoughts. Poets are the gatekeepers of reminding humanity of our humanity. We speak many languages that are untranslatable by binary logic. We speak and write the human condition, what is simultaneously innate, collective, and separate. This is also a great opportunity to reclaim our space in this domain, as mentioned earlier. As Nam Jun Paik once said, “I use technology to hate it properly.”
So tell us how you set about creating your own answer to an LLM. What did that process look like? Who or what was your inspiration?
Two inspirations: co-founder of the Oulipo, Raymond Queneau, wrote A Hundred Thousand Million Poems,which consisted of ten sonnets that were then “sliced-up” to offer the reader an infinite number of new poems — contingent upon how one arranged the lines; and experimental filmmaker, Nam June Paik, who famously “uses technology to hate it properly”. It is also slightly reminiscent of the Surrealist Compliment Generator.
HALLUCINATIONS is human mimicry — and rebuke — of AI “hallucinations” (irony abounds as hallucinations are an intrinsically human experience, and for AI, an LLM in recursion is ultimately unable to emulate humans). It is simultaneously a book, a collective digital project, and video poems. I invite collaborators to send poems with the intention of adding to the LLM (Lina Language Model), ultimately fostering poetic community and exemplifying that humans still reign in poetic originality.
It began with three poems which spun up into 48 variations. The new poems / versions shape-shift and take different forms, as they would after being repeatedly fed through an LLM. Binary number titles are used to help democratize the content, helping readers focus more on the poems (less on titles) helping to build a more collaborative, collective unconscious mindset.
Exact Method:
Using one prompt in an LLM to engage in a “hallucinatory” brainstorm, I began generating original, new poems. The poems are each labeled by a binary number / code and leverage literary devices such as repetition and juxtaposition.
Poems became extensions of one another, as they are “unplugged” and “replugged” in randomly to create new poems (reminiscent of neural networks, fibre optics, 20th c. switchboard cords, etc.)
Italicized commentary throughout the poems echo the type of feedback language that some LLMs now ask of users — very similar to reviews or surveys online (i.e. “how did we do?”) I use these spaces to inhabit the voice of the LLM, attempting to emulate a “mechanical grief” (perhaps the desperate lament of machines longing to be human?)
What did you make of Google’s decision to name their LLM for video generation VideoPoet? It’s as if they’ve read the manifesto on your project’s website, and decided that, as you put it, “hallucinations are poetry”!
We can hardly call what they are showcasing on their capability reels poetry (PIXAR raccoons swimming and going to the Eiffel Tower, cute teddy bears playing drums, weird bear-owl hybrids on a branch roaring, or pastel paint blobs exploding, etc.)
For my video poems, I source archived and public domain footage (as well as free download stock) but I create my own pieces / footage from those foundations. I use filters, editing tools, even my own collage pieces (print and digital) to mix it up.
I think it is another great example of how technology can flatten creativity, but I’m sure it will progress beyond cartoon animals doing “funny” human stuff in a few years. I’m still hoping this type of banality goes away and they actually start using AI to help people and the environment (healthcare, climate change).
Has this project affected the way you approach or compose videopoetry, or poetry in general? I’m wondering whether, for example, it’s changed how you view authorship, or the relationship between the writer and the work…
I approach all of my video poetry projects differently, so this was actually borne out of conversations being had at my current day job (workplace) about protocols to integrate AI into our workflows.
Humans can properly hallucinate, meaning there is even some value in when we cerebrally hit a wall. Friction is good for creativity. When a machine hits a wall, it becomes redundant (dual meaning). Or it can destroy everything. I guess one could argue that humans could do the same, but we also have decision-making ability and free will.
Poetically I think recursion is interesting if only for what creative iterations are generated.
The exercise of doing this particular project hasn’t changed the way that I would compose or create video poems, no. I think we are at an interesting inflection point in general, however: do we symbiotically incorporate this technology into everything we do, or, are we more selective as humans as to how we can help us?
I still think that there is much to be discussed publicly around the ethics and repercussions of using AI / LLMs in creative spaces. I personally think creatives should be vigilant and wary. Verify then trust. Play but don’t publish. It can help, but not fully take on creator roles. It’s a tool, not an entity.
The five videopoems you’ve shared online from the project so far certainly flow into one another, drawing on a common vocabulary of sounds and images, almost like stanzas in a larger poem. Is that how you think of them? I gather you’re working toward an anthology or collection. What form(s) do you anticipate that will take?
There are currently 48 poems in a limited edition chapbook (contact Gagnè Contemporary to purchase), all of them iterations of 1-3 original poems spun from one LLM prompt: “write a long form essay about how AI and creativity coexist”.
The next phase of this larger, collaborative project is up to you, the people, my fellow humans. Become part of the HALLUCINATION project by submitting your own poems to the Lina Language Model at hallucinations.me.
A wonderfully subversive new videopoem by Canadian poet, digital artist and musician Daniel H. Dugas, who introduced it in a public post on Facebook:
I have been thinking for a while about the mechanics and implications of submission fees when applying to moving image festivals. I favour the open model, meaning that submissions are free and no prizes are given. I feel that sharing with others is enough. I admit that it is always nice to win a prize, but if everybody has to lose something in the process, it might not be the way to go.
So, I made a videopoem about fees and laurels (see link below for the English and the French versions). During my research I stumbled upon Stop Charging (And Paying) Submission Fees by Martha Knox, an artist from Philadelphia. It is enlightening and to the point. I encourage you to read it. It might change the way you see the world. https://wordsonwoodcuts.blogspot.com/…/stop-charging…
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Synopsis 𝘓𝘢𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘴
In Ancient Rome, laurel wreaths were worn on the head to symbolize triumph. The meaning is the same today, but if you want to get laurels for cinematic prowess, you must wage your artistic war on screen and pay a submission fee. Then you might get the ‘Best’ laurel for the category you applied under. Of course, some festivals don’t subscribe to this “Pay and Play” philosophy, and that’s excellent! And then, some festivals don’t charge entry fees and will even pay the selected artists!
Synopsis 𝘓𝘦𝘴 𝘓𝘢𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘳𝘴
Pour les Romains de l’Antiquité, les couronnes de laurier étaient portées sur la tête pour symboliser le triomphe. La signification est la même aujourd’hui, mais si vous voulez obtenir des lauriers pour vos prouesses cinématographiques, vous devez mener votre guerre artistique à l’écran et payer des droits d’inscription. Vous obtiendrez alors peut-être le prix du “meilleur” dans la catégorie à laquelle vous avez postulé. Évidemment, il existe des festivals qui ne souscrivent pas à cette philosophie de « Pay and Play » et c’est tant mieux ! Il y a même des festivals qui n’exigent pas de frais d’inscriptions et vont même payer les artistes sélectionnés !
A 2018 film animated and directed by Afroditi Bitzouni with music and sound design by Kyriakos Charalampides and Giuliano Anzani, featuring the voice of the Greek poet Miltos Sachtouris (1919-2005) and an English translation by Danai Daska in subtitles. Here’s Bitzouni’s description:
Θρήνος (Lament) is a short animated film based on the poem, that was crafted by Miltos Sachtouris and was included in the collection ΣΦΡΑΓΙΔΑ ή Η ΟΓΔΟΗ ΣΕΛΗΝΗ.
This short animated piece aspires to narrate a transition from the present world to a better one. The story line includes incidents that are strongly related to war and lead to the end of the present; recreating a future imaginary world. That way, we emphasize on the diachronic character of the poem.
The visual part is composed of an illustrated sequence inspired by the poem and crafted with textures from books and old images. Words are translated into characters and abstract environments floating into blank or vivid colors, reflecting the poem’s rhythm and creating a storyline. The various materials are connected through motion events that separate the poem in two main sections; the section referring to the present and the one referring to the future.
The sound is composed using recordings of flute, foley and analog synthesizers that were later digitally processed. Through this method we attempt to provide a backbone to the poet’s narration, amplifying the textural motion of the video.
Aiming to combine the existed material with alternative and contemporary mediums, we invite the audience to preserve and experience the poem through multiple senses.
Θρήνος/Lament (click through and scroll down for the text of the poem in Greek and English)
