Content Objectives
Types and Techniques of Videopoems
In Videopoetry: A Manifesto, Tom Konyves defines videopoetry as:
a genre of poetry displayed on a screen, distinguished by its time-based, poetic juxtaposition of images with text and sound [...] the principal function of a videopoem is to demonstrate the process of thought and the simultaneity of experience, expressed in words – visible and/or audible – whose meaning is blended with, but not illustrated by, the images and the soundtrack7.
It is important to note that the video does not simply illustrate the poem. Instead, the images and sounds may complicate or even contradict the poem’s text to make new meanings. Konyves identifies five categories of videopoems: kinetic text, which presents animated text over a neutral background; sound text, in which text is read by a human with images juxtaposed on the screen; visual text, in which the text is displayed on the screen along with images; performance, which features the poet or an actor on screen speaking to the camera; and cin(e)poetry, in which the text of the poem is animated or superimposed over computer-modified graphics.8 Videopoems tend to be fairly short and easily accessible on any internet-connected device, conforming to Quashie’s preference for a poem that is “portable”. By the end of the unit, students should be able to think critically about the strengths and drawbacks of each type in order to select one (or combine multiple) for their final project.
In addition to the typical poetic elements like sound devices and figurative language, video poets also employ tools unique to their craft. Konyves points out that repetition of images in a videopoem creates a rhythm similar to the way repeating sounds in a text poem creates rhythm9. Transitions like cross-dissolve and fade add structure, while split-screen, acceleration, or slow motion affect the pacing and the viewer’s perception of time, similar to the use of punctuation in a text poem10. Acceleration and slow motion can also set the mood, with a quick succession of images creating a frantic feeling and slow motion instilling a dream-like quality. A second important objective for this unit is for students to recognize some common elements in videopoems and use the academic terminology associated with the genre to analyze videopoems in discussion and writing. After examining five examples of videopoems, students work collaboratively to create their own videopoems using the types and techniques discussed above.
Performance: “Wade in the Water”
Walidah Imarisha’s “Wade in the Water”11 is a great example of performance poetry. I want students to notice the way Imarisha’s delivery through her breath and body language embody the message of the poem. The video opens with Imarisha on stage, in front of a microphone, in darkness with yellow, blue, and green lights flashing to suggest the dire, watery setting of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Imarisha begins the poem with a gasp, imitating the sounds of someone struggling to avoid drowning. Throughout the poem, she uses these gasps as punctuation or to differentiate among several poetic personas to whom she gives voice. Imarisha uses gasps to emphasize particular words, like when she describes what FEMA and the rest of the federal government “gave” to New Orleans in response to the hurricane and the humanitarian disaster that followed: “... blood [gasp] and blood [gasp] and blood [gasp] and bullets.” Here, the gasps function similarly to commas or dashes and contribute to a desperate tone. Earlier in the poem, she uses gasps to shift from the words of a father being held at gunpoint by law enforcement, begging to be allowed to search for the body of his son, to a brief anecdote about the 1960s dragging of the Mississippi River, which resulted in the discovery and abandonment of the remains of dozens of Black bodies. In this instance, the gasp functions more like a period or a stanza break, separating one section of the poem from the next.
In addition to her breathwork, Imarisha also uses hand gestures to develop the theme of injustice in the poem. When describing the father mentioned above, Imarisha raises her hands, embodying his surrender to police. This gesture makes it clear that he is not a threat, and that the implied force of the police officers confronting him is unwarranted. When describing FEMA’s slow response to the disaster, Imarisha indicates the number of weeks that passed without aid using her fingers and then a cutting gesture at her neck after the fourth week. This gesture adds to the sense of the speakers being cut off from the rest of the country, cut off from help, and cut off from life itself. The text of the poem employs some traditional poetic elements that teachers should emphasize with students, such as alliteration in “bloated bodies, / black and brown people”, a metaphor in “dreads coiled and purring on his head”, and oxymoron and imagery in “An oldyoung woman / stands in her decomposing house, / black mold climbing up the walls, / coating baby pictures / and high school diplomas.” In spite of some of the horrific images layered in the text, Imarisha ends on a hopeful note, cradling an invisible baby in her arms as she describes a mother’s refusal to surrender to despair: “She means this spark of hope / soggy / sputtering / but burning out / enuf space / to catch a breath.” Imarisha’s words and body language convey the preciousness of hope and new life amidst the chaos and devastation.
In an excellent analysis of the poem, Moran calls the speakers in Imarisha’s work examples of the “transcultural counterwitness,” which he defines as a figure outside the structure of mainstream journalism whose perspective allows for a critique or counternarrative12. Moran provides context on the origins of the poem, describing how Imarisha’s experiences as a volunteer in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina contrasted with the contemporary news coverage, which portrayed Black New Orleans residents as violent and uneducated criminals13. This context is essential to understanding the underlying messages and ideas of Imarisha’s poem. By embodying and giving voice to their suffering, Imarisha humanizes her speakers in order to fight back against the racist stereotypes presented in the media. As students explore Imarisha’s use of multiple perspectives in the poem, it will be important for them to reflect on how poetry can empower us to counteract false and harmful narratives and bring the truth to light.
Cin(e)poetry: “We Real Cool”
This video from the Poetry Foundation takes the classic poem by Gwendolyn Brooks and depicts the events of the poem along with Brooks’s commentary on its inspiration.14 Using paper cutouts and pen and ink illustrations, the filmmakers represent Brooks, her audience, and the characters mentioned in the poem. The video can be divided into three main sections with a little coda at the end. As students examine the poem, I want them to notice the way sound effects, music, and color set the mood and show transitions in time and place. The first section begins with peaceful images of a ticking clock, a cat dozing on a bookshelf, and the clicking of Brooks’s typewriter keys. Brooks then rides the Bronzeville bus to a poetry reading at a library. Slow jazz music eases the viewer into the setting, and audio of Brooks’s brief introduction to the poem plays, followed by the audience’s applause. Brooks then launches into the story of the poem’s genesis. The transition into the second section of the video is signaled by a shift from color to black and white, and the text, “Thirty years earlier” appears on the screen. A younger Brooks passes a pool hall and observes seven young boys loafing there during school hours. Sound effects like the click of pool balls and the clink of glasses set the scene. As Brooks questions, “How do they feel about themselves?,” the music accelerates, and she reads the poem. In an example of cin(e)poetry, the poem’s text flashes on the screen while Brooks narrates.
The final section of the video turns the poem into a song. The music’s tempo increases further, and a younger female voice sings the poem as lyrics. The boys become dancing silhouettes. This section takes the viewer out of Brooks’s specific experience and moves toward a more collective experience. These boys can be any boys; what is important is their youth and their energy. By using a younger voice to sing the lyrics, the speaker of the poem becomes more aligned with the youths themselves rather than an older observer. This is reinforced by Brooks’s repetition of the word “we” throughout the poem. At the end of the video, when the music has stopped, the boys leave the pool hall. As they pass Brooks, one boy turns around and has a brief but significant moment of eye contact with her. He continues on his way, and she smiles.
In Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice, Melham sees the poem as a maternal lament on the boys’ wasted young lives.15 While many readers see this poem as a judgemental adult criticizing the choices of ne’er-do-well teens, the video and Brooks’s introduction complicate that reading. Instead, the video presents the poem as a celebration of the boys’ precariously brief lives. The upbeat music, dancing animations, and the shared connection between Brooks and the boy at the end of the video all gesture toward the boys’ carpe diem attitude without criticizing it. Melham correctly points out, and teachers should emphasize with their students, Brooks’s skillful use of repetition and enjambment to create a syncopated rhythm for the poem.16 It is also important to note how the selection of music reinforces the poem’s rhythm. Another prominent feature in the poem is alliteration, such as the sibilant sounds of “sing sin” and “strike straight”. With this videopoem, it is important to discuss with students the contrast between the text and the video as well as the musical quality of the language. For this particular poem, I would have students close read the text first and then show the video. It is likely that their first impression of Brooks’s attitude toward the boys would be similar to Melham’s, and upon viewing the video they may note the contrast between the text on the page and the choices made by the filmmakers.
Sound Text: “Multitudes”
Similarly to the Brooks video, the Poetry Foundation’s sound text rendering of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself uses narration and animation to complicate a well-known poem17. The video takes lines from different parts of the poem and re-mixes them, providing a model for students of how to select and curate lines from an existing poem to create their own message. In this videopoem, the main character depicted on the screen is a paper puppet rendition of Whitman himself. However, instead of using a single reader, this video uses three different narrators to illustrate Whitman’s sentiment “I contain multitudes”. The choice of narrators and the order in which their narrations are arranged are key features to point out to students when viewing the video. Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar narrates the first section of the video, reading excerpts that take us from Whitman’s musing on a blade of grass to his reflections on death. The text of the poem in this section uses playful alliteration and assonance in the lines, “I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” The animations parallel the text here, with images of the natural world representing life (grass, a ladybug), transitioning to images of death and rebirth (dandelion spores drifting on the wind) and finally to images more obviously connected to death (animal skeleton). As Akbar reads the lines, “A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; / How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he,” the image of an animal skeleton appears on the screen, implying that the “it” in the second line could be death itself rather than grass. Whitman, being alive, does now know what death is any more than the child does.
In the next section of the video, narrated by African American poet Duriel E. Harris, the focus shifts from death to life. Whitman leaves behind the woodland setting of the first part of the video and floats through space. All three narrators recite the line “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” in unison, gesturing to a universality in human experience. On the screen, Whitman is replaced by other people: old, young, male, female, Black, Asian. There is an interesting tension here. While the images on the screen represent difference, the text of the poem emphasizes unity. The choice to have writers of color, including a woman, narrating Whitman’s poem is an intriguing one, given Whitman’s historical moment. Whitman wrote and revised Song of Myself before and after the Civil War, and the poem reflects his desire for national unity. However, Price points out that despite Whitman’s abolitionist beliefs, he primarily viewed the war as being about the preservation of the union and not the ending of slavery.18 As a white man in the mid-19th century, there was only so much Whitman could do to imagine the interior lives of Black people or women, though he makes an effort to portray the broad spectrum of American society in the poem. In this videopoem, the selection of the readers and the animations bring the poem closer to the universality that Whitman was aiming for. Where Whitman’s text embraces diversity, it is all expressed through a white lens. The video emphasizes the point that true diversity means not whitewashing society–for the filmmakers, the goal is a plurality that recognizes everyone’s identities and experiences rather than an undifferentiated universality.
As the videopoem continues, Whitman returns to earth, recognizing in fallen leaves “letters from God dropped in the street.” Not only are we back on earth, through this image we are back in the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The final narrator, African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa, is the oldest of the three poets. The order of the narrators creates structure in the videopoem, hinting at a progression of human life from youth to middle age to old age. Komunyakaa reads at a halting pace, with longer pauses between words suggesting a thoughtful elder reflecting back on his life. This impression is reinforced by the on-screen images of hands, with skin replaced by veins, then muscles, and then bones. As the text reflects on mortality, the images show the human body in gradual decay. The videopoem ends with another gesture toward universality, as death is something all humans will eventually experience. We hear all three narrators again on the line, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” and each narrator takes another turn as the poem concludes. The effect is oddly comforting. In admitting to contradicting himself, Whitman gives readers permission to embrace the contradictory parts of their own identities and the idea that two opposing things can be true at the same time. The videopoem shows that there is life in death and death in life; instead of a binary opposition, the two are deeply intertwined.
Visual Text: “Choices”
In sharp contrast to the vibrant animations and music in the Brooks and Whitman videopoems, I am including the Poetry Foundation’s visual text interpretation of Tess Gallagher’s “Choices” in the unit19. This quiet videopoem, created by Carolyn Corbett at USC Film School, is a master class in how pacing, sound, and visual effects can combine to set the mood and theme. It begins with the gentle patter of raindrops. The text of the first line does not appear on the screen until over 2 minutes into the video, preceded by the sounds of the rain and bird calls and sepia-toned images of a snowy forest landscape. The color scheme gives the video a timeless quality, and the use of photographic images rather than animated ones lends a sense of realism and a serious tone. The bleating of sheep and the crowing of a rooster suggest a remote rural location, but humans are still present in the images. A close-up of a young girl’s face, her small hands wrapped around the bark of a tree, implies innocence and connection between humans and the natural world. This contrasts with the sense of weighty responsibility imposed on the only adult featured in the video, who is filmed in slow-motion plodding through the snow. This is the person who will have to make the titular “choices” and live with the consequences. The text of the poem appears on the screen two lines at a time, interspersed with more images of wintry mountains and trees.
When Gallagher’s speaker notices a bird’s nest in the sapling they are about to cut down, the filmmaker uses a closeup of a bird’s nest “clutched” in the boughs of a tree. Teachers should focus on this word choice with students, pointing out how this verb conveys the idea of something precious that should be protected at all costs. Another bird defending its nest is shown along with the lines, “Suddenly, in every tree / an unseen nest,” as the speaker decides not to cut down any of the trees at all in order to protect the baby birds potentially nestled there. Destroying a nest is so anathema to the speaker that she decides it is not worthwhile to “clear a view to snow / on the mountain.” Here, the speaker is prioritizing nature over her own desire for a good view. The video ends with an abrupt shift to spring, showing two children clutching flowers and gazing upward as petals or snowflakes fall. By including the images of children, the filmmaker elaborates on the message of the poem. While the text itself can be read as advocating for the protection of nature for its own sake, the video clarifies some reasons why nature deserves to be defended: because we should view the baby birds as precious, the same way we would view our own children, or because we should preserve the natural world so future generations can enjoy it. This stark videopoem shows students that theatrical narration and animation are not necessary to make an impact on the audience, and that even a poem that seems to be personal, confessional, or autobiographical can also be interpreted in multiple ways by different readers. Unlike “We Real Cool”, I would have students watch the video and generate observations and questions about it before close reading the text of the poem in order to preserve the video’s suspenseful effect.
Sound/Kinetic Text: “Situation 7”
Poet Claudia Rankine describes Situations, created in collaboration with filmmaker John Lucas, as “a multi-genre response to contemporary life in the twenty-first century.”20 Point of view is a key feature of this videopoem to touch on in instruction. Unlike the other texts in this unit, “Situation 7” thrusts viewers into the narrative through the use of the second person “you” throughout the poem. The text describes a scenario in which “you” see a man on the train sitting alone. The other passengers on the train subtly avoid proximity to the man, but “you” choose to sit next to him. As Rankine puts it in a metaphor, “The space next to the man is a pause in a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill.” This implies an urgency on “your” part to show solidarity with the man, even as “you” reflect on the fact that other people’s avoidance is probably a daily occurrence for him. “Where he goes,” Rankine intones, “the space follows him.” This videopoem combines elements of sound text and kinetic text. Throughout most of the video, Rankine narrates in a monotone, employing none of the dramatic breathwork or delivery of Imarisha or the syncopated rhythm of Brooks. This conveys the quotidian nature of the scenario: this is the kind of microaggression that happens every day, in all different kinds of settings; it illustrates what Fred Moten, quoting Saidyia Hartman, calls “the diffusion of terror” in mundane and quotidian acts.21 A sad, tender piano score complements Rankine’s reflective tone in the poem, and the images of flickering lights reflected in glass and the repeated images of walls, bushes, and fences create a rhythm reminiscent of the gentle motion of a train. In a brief example of visual text, the words “What does suspicion do?” appear on a black background about a minute and a half into the film, and a little over three minutes in, Rankine voices this as one of the central questions with which the poem grapples: “What does suspicion mean? What does suspicion do?”
It is significant to point out that the man who is the object of suspicion on the train is represented in the video as Black, even though the man’s race is never explicitly stated in the text. Rankine’s words and Lucas’s images work together to show the impact of suspicion not only on the Black man who is its object, but also on the bystanders including “you.” The poem calls out one woman on the train who would rather “stand all the way to Union Station” than sit next to this Black man. Even though we don’t know the exact time or distance, Rankine’s use of “all the way” implies that they are substantial. This woman’s suspicion drives her to act illogically, spurning a perfectly good seat because the presence of a Black man makes her feel threatened. The man, in Lucas’s rendering, takes a moment to sniff his shirt as though wondering, What is her problem with me? Do I smell? The other passengers’ suspicion causes him to doubt himself, even though Rankine suspects he would never admit it. The “you” character in the poem, in contrast, rejects the suspicion of the other passengers. “You” take this opportunity to empathize with the man, imagining what it is like to go through life constantly being mistrusted, and ultimately “you” are willing to declare, if asked, that “you” and the man are “traveling as a family.” Even though this man is a stranger, “you” are willing to claim him as kin. The other passengers’ suspicion has moved “you” to seek a deeper connection with a fellow human instead of keeping him at arm’s length. The poem and video would likely spark rich classroom discussions about pacing, imagery, and rhythm as well as thematic conversations about the types of people whom we treat with suspicion in our society. In this case, I recommend beginning with a close reading of the poem and then showing the video to help students understand how the images in the video clarify the poem’s message about the corrosive power of racial bias.
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