Emerging Genres of Video Poetry

As poetry intersects with online video, we are seeing the emergence of new hybrid genres. Here is an attempt at surveying those genres. But before I get to my categories, I invite you to dive in and watch a video poem. Later on, at the end, I will come back to it for analysis. If you don't watch the rest of the sample video poetry in this post, watch this one. It matters. And it's done so very well. It's called "To This Day" and it is by Shane Koyczan:

To This Day from To This Day on Vimeo.

Without any analysis, I think it fair to say that a video like this proves that poetry is more than alive and well online in video form today. It's actually quite amazing. What did you think made it work so well?

Okay, how is it that poetry and video are coming together online today? I'll discuss the following:

• Poetry from TV Series
• Poetry from Films
• Poetry read by Authors
• Performance Poetry / Spoke Word Poetry
• Musical Adaptations of Poetry
• Visible Text
• Animated Text / Kinetic Typography
• 3D Environment
• The Illustrated Poem
• Poetry Analysis Video
• The Video Poem

Poetry from TV Series

Poetry has already been active in popular culture, and with ready availability to past seasons of TV series, we are now seeing poetry videos that are excerpts from episodes. These often have a parodic feel to them, as these two examples that were given by Andrew (Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" done by the Muppets and Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" done by the Simpsons):

At other times, series TV has used poetry seriously, as in this excerpt from a Star Trek episode. Here, as Captain James T. Kirk recites a famous line from John Masefield's 1902 poem, "Sea Fever" ("And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by") it gives a kind of gravitas or seriousness to the scene:

(The Star Trek franchise has had a longterm affection for the literary, and especially Shakespeare, as any trekkie can inform you...)

Poetry from Films

Unlike TV series, films tend to use poetry more centrally and seriously, and we are now seeing video clips appear of scenes from films in which poetry is read aloud by characters at some critical moment of plot or of character development. Philip already posted an example of this (from the movie Invictus) and Jennifer has posted similarly about the 1989 film, Dead Poets Society. In another example, Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds...") is used in the 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility to develop the relationship between Marianne and Willoughby:

Later, the sonnet is reprised very emotionally by Kate Winslet's character, Marianne Dashwood. This shows how much we see poetry being a resource which we reach toward (directly or vicariously) at moments of intense feeling (joy, loss, etc.):

Poetry read by Authors

For better and worse, we are seeing videos of authors reading their own works of poetry. Sined already discussed a video of Gwendolyn Brooks reading her own poetry. An author recitation can give authenticity to the poem, but it can also prevent one from recognizing alternative, viable ways to deliver those words. It makes for some interesting interpretive problems.

Some of those problems are brought up by Briggs' recent post, by the way. He talks about finding a video of a recording of Allen Ginsburg reciting his famous poem, "Howl." It certainly is an interesting recording, especially since it is the author performing it, but it is hardly a video at all. It has a single static image as we listen to 27 minutes of that very long poem. The recording has value, but not as a video. Sometimes a video is just audio with a thin visual veneer.

When one can both hear and see the poet reading his or her own work, this can provide all kinds of interpretive contexts. For example, this 1975 recording of poet Robert Bly reciting "A Cry Goes Out Over the Pastures" includes his own enthusiastic inflection as well as a wealth of gestures that either enhance or distract, depending on your point of view.  By the time he reached the ending, I really wanted to hear / see the poem again. It intrigued me: "We cannot remain in love with what we cannot name."

The age of easy video creation and distribution has allowed "authors" of poetry to publicize their works. At times the sincerity of the poet makes the poetry interesting based just on the ethos and delivery of the poet and pretty much independent of the poem's quality. For example, Kojo Baffoe's deep, calm voice turns a birthday poem for his mother into something thoughtful rather than trite:

But, as we might expect, other "authors" are foisting their poetry upon the pixels in painful ways.

I've stripped away the identity of this poet, but if you were to find him, I daresay you'd find his poetry and its performance a bit hard to listen to or watch (people! lighting!). Behold, the era of the amateur poet is upon us, both for better and for worse.

It actually is possible for someone to simply read their poetry into the camera and it can be successful. Listen to Sophie Klahr recite her "Kairos; Deleted Scene 1 (Method Acting)." I found that the two times that she looked up at the camera were like punctuation marks, interesting for their sparseness across an otherwise moody poem:


Kairos; Deleted Scene 1 (Method Acting) from sophie klahr on Vimeo.

Performance Poetry / Spoken Word Poetry

Some videos are now featuring people publicly performing poetry (either famous poetry or their own). Lindsey has already posted about spoken word poetry and embedded an example of a pair of readers performing poetry together. Poetry has clearly become a performance art by way of modern media.

People have been reciting poetry at clubs for a long time. See this famous example from the movie So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993)

Mike Myers' character is in fact parodying a tradition of poetry performed to music in an impromptu fashion that goes all the way back to Beowulf. The more recent ancestor to this kind of performed poetry comes from the Beat generation, as typified in this wonderful B-movie from 1958, High School Confidential. This clip is amazing in the way that the performer so naturally renders the beat lingo and dialect. The snapping gestures are priceless. Check out the text of the poem she is performing, "High School Drag."

Hilary recently introduced us to Slam Poetry, which is the most recent incarnation of spoken-word, live performance poetry. And it has gotten a great breath of new life via online video. Here, again, is the performance Hilary posted (of Anis Mojgani's "Shake the Dust"). Nothing like a live audience and a confident performer!

Musical Adaptations of Poetry

Some of the poetry videos of today feature musician performances in which famous works of poetry have been set to music. These are not films or taken from movies. They are sound recordings. Sometimes, these take the form of music videos. For example, here is David Gilmour (of Pink Floyd) performing his musical adaptation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"):

Such music videos can be quite amazing, but they are also highly produced (in other words, expensive and professional). They are really more like films or the film video (discussed last, below).

Some people simply take audio recordings of musical adaptations of poetry and turn these into videos. In this next example, Rufus Wainwright's version of Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 ("When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes") has been made into a video by simply adding various still photos of the artist to the sound recording. I think this is a wonderful adaptation musically, but the visuals are obviously lacking.

Visible Text

In contrast to the above, in which it is the audio and music which is dominant in rendering the poetry, there are videos that feature the text and even call more attention to text as a flexible and interesting medium. Kimara has already demonstrated this when she posted this video of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" read by Christopher Lee. Note how the gothic kind of type font used when putting the words to Poe's poem on the screen. The font of the text is certainly trying to evoke the gothic mood of that darkly romantic poem (as are the images). Could this be a bit over the top?

Another way in which the texts of poems are getting serious attention through online videos is through videos that put the text for song lyrics up as the song plays. I recently appreciated this when looking up some French pop music whose words I was struggling to understand. I liked reading the French as I heard Zaho singing "Je te promet" because I could understand the language better this way. The same thing, of course, works within one's own language. Text made more visible is text made more easy to understand and to analyze. (This song, by the way, c'est formidable!)

Animated Text / Kinetic Typography

A more sophisticated way by which the texts of poems are coming alive on video today is through what is called "kinetic typography" or animated text. (Perhaps this is the modern counterpart to the concrete poetry that Jennifer recently discussed?) Using Adobe After Effects, I created the following poem video using actor Alan Rickman's recording of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130:

Along this same vein, Jocelyn has posted an video interpretation of an e. e. cummings poem that includes animation of both text and other symbols. Like the Rickman recording, the cummings poem derives a lot of its meaning from an engaging vocal performance. Yet another example of kinetic typography can be found in the short video that Sined posted of Gwendolyn Brooks reading her poem.

A cousin to the animated text video for poetry is the use of presentation software to give poetry a visual emphasis within a presentational mode. The difference, of course, is that unlike video or film, such presentations, though sequential, are not regulated as to time. This allows readers to read at their own pace. I made an example of this with one of my own poems, "Unholy Sonnet." I recast my original sonnet into a visual environment using Prezi:

This is not, strictly, a video version of a poem, though it was easy for me to use screen capturing and turn it into one which I then posted on YouTube:

That video version was without any sound. I'm now asking myself whether it would have been more engaging had I added music, or voiceover reading the poem, or both. Obviously the new media tools available are making multiple variations possible with the presentation of poetry.

3D Environment

Like the kinetic typography example above, this next video (a rendition of Shakespeare's Sonnet 133 ("Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan"), makes the text of the poem dominant. However, in this instance, the words appear within a 3D environment (in this case, a prison cell). Here, they are written on the walls and surfaces somewhat randomly and in what appears to be blood. It strongly implies a character and a story that is not in the original poem but is consistent with the themes of torture and slavery that are in the poem. Overall it makes for a very engaging adaptation. Note, also, how music is used to enhance this unusual setting for a poem:

Sonnet 133 | The new Media with Shakespeare from iNEEDaDAMNgoodJOB.com on Vimeo.

The Illustrated Poem

Poetry draws much of its poetry from imagery, so it is unsurprising that videos of poetry would at times make efforts to make literal and visible the images that are described within a poem. Jennifer already discussed this video, a rendition of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, which uses a 3D animated character to represent the ideal woman mentioned in the poem. The video is also very rich with visuals depicting the season imagery from Shakespeare's poem. Do you think this literalizing of the poem's images enhances our appreciation of them or somehow cheapens the poem? Or does it depend, and if so, on what?

Another example of the video which illustrates a poem (also an example of performance poetry) is the video version of "Annie McClue" that Kimara embedded when discussing YouTube in a recent post. This is also a very good example of both comical and children-oriented video poetry. Watch and smile.

Poetry Analysis Video

Poetry is getting interpreted within online videos. Sometimes this takes a fairly casual bent, as when someone paraphrases and/or explains a poem. See, for example, the epic Romanian poem, Luceafarul, explained (and partly recited from memory in Romanian).

Other poetry analysis videos are more straightforwardly academic, as when a teacher or professor talks through a poem, as Tim Hewitt does with Wilfred Owen's poem, "Disabled." He discusses (and also shows photos from) the war setting of this poem, providing contextual analysis. He even shows an image of the original manuscript of this poem (at 2:30). This is a five-minute poetry explication video:



Students are also able to give competent and interesting analyses of poems, and creatively as well. A prior student of mine, Paul Bills, shows the text of his sonnet and times the appearance of each line as he reads it. This isn't just a recitation, though. He color codes the various formal features (the iambic pentameter, imagery, personification, etc) within the poem, but also names these features and themes to the side of the poem as he goes. He also uses a graphic to help us see the structure of his sonnet:

The Video Poem

A video poem is not a reading of a poem that happens to get recorded. Nor is it primarily the performance of a poem by a poet or anyone else. It is first and foremost a film, a work of cinema. As such, its various media are integrated and purposeful (they are part of the intended and coherent planning of the original artist). This emerging genre has whole festivals devoted to it (see Visible Verse) as well as online periodicals, reviews, etc. (See this resource to find video poetry online).

There are, in fact, content channels emerging just for the video poem. Some of these are creative renditions of traditional poetry (such as the "Pearls of Wisdom - Classic Poetry Reading" YouTube channel. But others are original poetry / original films.

The following, "Innocent beat" (by Martha McCollough) has kinetic typography in it, but unlike the examples of kinetic typography shown above, the animated text in this video poem was not created by someone who found and then used a previously recorded song or audio track to make a video; it was created by the filmmaker to be integrated with the audio that she also created. That audio is not merely a recitation of poetry, it is produced sound (with varied pitches, echoes, multiple tracks, and sound effects). In other words, both the visual and the audio are coherently conceived of and executed toward a singular effect.

This returns me to the video at the top of my post, "To This Day," which is itself a prime example of a video poem, and give my reasons for why it works so well. The answer is pretty simple: it works well as a whole because each of its components works so well, and these are tightly orchestrated toward a singular overall effect:

• The quality of the poem's writing independent of the audio or visuals. Read the text of the poem by itself. On its own, it is a fine piece of writing
• The audio performance by the poet is dramatic, authentic, and engaging. You listen and you believe. You can listen to the audio version of the poem by itself, too. This think would have worked purely as an audio poem.
• The animation is varied, interesting, and engaging by itself, and perfectly complements the narrative as well as the personality of the poet performing the piece.
• The story and the theme are both personal and broadly important. We are not given a lecture on bullying; we are given an engaging personal account that has the ring of truth, allowing the poet to take a more take-action stance about it as the video goes on.
• The way the video was crowdsourced. This is not something we would know at first glance, but the poet invited people to submit videos for segments of the final video. See the Vimeo page where submissions for the video were solicited and the project explained. Anyone attempting to contribute would be seriously invested in the message of the poem and in its completion and distribution. That is fascinating story all on its own.

I think this last point is a good one to end on. Online videos of poetry, like many other projects today, are open to the unique dynamics of the electronic social media. These include collaboration, remixing, user-generated content, and crowdsourcing. 

In a way, these new media uses of poetry are circling back to the origins of poetry in the "multimedia" or "multimodal" recitations and performances of old. These were conducted among small communities that listened, memorized, repeated, and contributed something of their own as they passed along the tradition of poetry.

What other types of poetry videos have you noticed?