Written in the midst of a deep depression, Eric Pankey’s “Cogitatio Mortis” (Latin for “I think of death”) is translated by video artists Jeff Saunders and Scott Olson. Each scene, anchored, “measures the same hour” differently.
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James Longenbach’s spare poem about a bygone boyhood season gets atmospheric, thanks to video artist Deb Kirkeeide’s soft-edged, overlapping watercolors.
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Visual artist Angella Kassube was inspired to re-envision, in joyous colors, poet Bridget Lowe’s grounded prayer for sight and insight.
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An ounce of humility goes a long way in this grounded adaptation of Bob Hicok’s runaway musings on big oil by documentarian Joanna Kohler.
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Blink and it’s gone. But video artists Scott Olson and Jeff Saunders use water and light to capture forever this haiku-like poem by Buddhist poet Jane Hirshfield.
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Richard Wilbur, one of America’s most august poets, speaks through the voice of iPhone-wielding video artist Faith Eskola’s five-year-old child in this meditation on the often-dormant roots of faith.
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Henry David Thoreau himself is struck from this David Wagoner poem as re-interpreted by video artist Adam Tow, whose inspiration springs from a different era.
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Partly filmed in the Pulitzer Prize winning poet’s New York apartment, and partly animated by director and animation artist Juan Delcan, this new poem by Mark Strand straddles those worlds … and a few more.
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Video artist Amy Schmitt uses jazz and a hard-boiled male voice talent to bump up the snob factor of Erin Belieu’s “When at a Certain Party in NYC.”
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By layering transparent and translucent images, animator Emma Burghardt enlightens this elemental post-apocalyptic poem by K. A. Hays.
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Tom Jacobsen buries the headline in L.S. Klatt’s phantasmic pastoral elegy for one of America’s great realist painters.
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Our 2012 Season, which has been produced in partnership with BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2011, opens with Scott Wenner’s tense dream-time remake of David Lehman’s “French Movie.”
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Co-founded by animator/producer Angella Kassube and poet Todd Boss, Motionpoems is a nonprofit production company that turns great contemporary poems into short films.
We introduce America's best video artists to America's best living writers, and step aside. Then we make the resulting films available free to you ... our subscribers!
Our films (all in glorious hi-def) screen at film festivals, cinemas, libraries, museums, schools, bookstores ...
We do it because we love it.
Welcome!
Join us for the world premiere of more than a dozen new films at the Walker Art Center on April 24, 2013, at 6pm and 8pm. Free. Reservations: 612/375-7622.
Featuring poems by:
MARY SZYBIST | DOBBY GIBSON | LEILA WILSON | STEPHEN BURT | EIREANN LORSUNG | ROBERT GIBB | BOB HICOK | LAURA KASISCHKE | MARK STRAND | EDUARDO C. CORRAL | MAXINE KUMIN | TISHANI DOSHI | DEAN YOUNG
adapted for film by:
JUSTIN AND KRISTIN SCHAACK | MARK RUBBO | DAVID P. HANSON | CRAIG HUBBARD | PABLO DELCAN | TOM JACOBSEN | KERI MOLLER | GREG WINTER | SCOTT WENNER | JOANNA KOHLER | ADAM TOW | BABE ELLIOTT WALKER | ANGELLA KASSUBE
Poets: Erin Belieu, Marvin Bell, Robert Bly, Todd Boss, K. A. Hays, Bob Hicok, Jane Hirshfield, L. S. Klatt, David Lehman, James Longenbach, Bridget Lowe, Thomas Lux, Freya Manfred, David Mason, Tim Nolan, Eric Pankey, Mark Strand, Dag Straumsvag, David Wagoner, Richard Wilbur
Animators/Video Artists: Emma Burghardt, Antonio Cicarelli, Juan Delcan, John Eickholt, Faith Eskola, Tom Jacobsen, Angella Kassube, Deb Kirkeeide, Joanna Kohler, Scott Olson, Jay Orff, Jeff Saunders, Amy Schmitt, Adam Tow, Monika Umba, Matt Van Ekeren, Scott Wenner, Greg Winter
CLICK HERE to get a new motionpoem each month ... FREE.
This activity is funded, in part, by the arts and cultural heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the Legacy Amendment vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008. Web design by Karen Kopacz, Design for the Arts. Motionpoems(R) is a registered trademark of Motionpoems, Inc., a nonprofit program of fiscal agent Springboard for the Arts. All content copyright 2011-12.
