Check out the audio/video at some of these local venues (let me know if you have suggestions for more).
There's quite a bit of poetry out there that has been made into film. Rather than simply recording the poet reading their work (for that, see the column on the right), this is a whole separate genre of film in which the poem is the soundtrack to a fully realized visual composition. Below I've gathered a few examples and links to channels and sites where you can see a lot more.
"Snake" is a 14-minute film about the poetry of Pashtun women of Afghanistan. Beautiful photography accompanying a wonderful collection of poems, nicely translated.
This video poem is part of the Poetry Films series produced by the On Being Project.
This is a series of poetry films put together by the On Being Project.
This is a bit of a hybrid, somewhere between a fully developed "video poem" like the others in this column, and a more conventional " reading" like what's in the column on the right.
In this video, the director Jessica Brillhart reads a poem by Richard Brautigan, but with a bit of a stage set and props and with more of a sense of the camera than in a typical reading or performance. That's what pushes it over toward "video poem" for me, because of how it's using the possibilities of video as a medium.
It's a cool poem that might make you think.
The Cadence Video Poetry Festival is an annual film festival produced by the Northwest Film Forum dedicated to video poetry.
I haven't been able to find examples of the films themselves, though the Cadence website linked above has some cool trailers.
Here's a short TV news story about the festival from KING-5 TV in Seattle, which describes the genre and the festival and has some nice clips of the films themselves.
Videos of poets reading/performing their work, whether in slam mode (a more performance-oriented style) or in the traditional style of simply reading the poem aloud.
Some of the links in the left column (Local Stuff) are also videos of live performances.
The video above explains what a poetry slam is. From Poetry Slam, Inc., the sponsors of National Poetry Slam.
This is the YouTube channel for Ours Poetica, a project of the Poetry Foundation and Complexly. The name is a play on the Latin phrase Ars Poetica, which means the art of poetry.
In this series (no longer in production), the poet or another person reads the poem while the video follows the text of the poem. Very well produced.
Below is a link to the latest video in the series.
In the video above, "Anne Waldman reads an excerpt from her book FAST SPEAKING WOMAN as part of Dear Poet, the Academy of American Poets' educational project for National Poetry Month 2016. Learn more at www.poets.org/dear-poet."
