An exquisite corpse poem generated by thirteen writers during the 2018 Airstream Poetry Festival, translated into video by artist Shaun Kardinal and shared over Instagram stories throughout the month.

Director Bio:
Shaun Kardinal (b 1982) is a conceptual artist and curator creating form with ephemeral repetition. His current multi-year, evolving exhibition Forwardlaunched in May 2017 from the foundation of his 2015–16 iterative curatorial project Turn. Using alteration, conglomeration, and curation, his cross-disciplinary practice manifests as modular structures, collaborative platforms, web-exclusive exhibitions, and interactive physical-digital installations. See Part 3 of Forward at Glassbox in August.

A decomposition triptych developed in collaboration between participants of The Image Speaks: Video Poetry Workshop, led by instructor Amaranth Borsuk.

Credits:
Poem + Direction: Amaranth Borsuk, Colleen Trundy, Ellie Kozlowski, Francis Miranda, Nathan Gray, Rana San, Susan Harewood, and Zoe Wilson

Instructor Bio:
Amaranth Borsuk is a scholar, poet, and book artist working at the intersection of print and digital media. She is interested in forms that take poetry off the page. She is the author of Between Page and Screen, a digital pop-up book of poetry, and a recipient of an NEA “Expanded Artists’ Books” grant for the collaboration Abra, a limited-edition book and free iOS app that recently received the Turn on Literature prize. She has collaborated on video, installation, artware, and interactive works, and is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Pomegranate Eater (Kore Press, 2016). Borsuk is Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell, where she also serves as Associate Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics.

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Desire is black, with flecks of gold in it.

Director Bio:
Catherine Bresner is a poet and visual artist living in Seattle. Her hybrid book of poetry and poetry comics, the empty season, won the Diode Edition Book Prize in 2017.  She is also the author of the chapbook The Merriam Webster Series and the artist book Everyday Eros (Mount Analogue 2017). Her poetry has appeared in The Offing, Heavy Feather Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Passages North, Verse Daily and elsewhere.  She has been the coordinating editor of the Seattle Review and the publicity assistant for Wave Books. Currently, she is the managing editor for BOAAT Press. You can find more of her work at www.catherinebresner.com.

A video poem about inaction and negligence to the information within the media that we consume especially at this time when the impact of humanity on the environment is prevalent in news media and reads as ominous predictions from some religious text. Filmed and shot in Seattle in April 2019.

JURY AWARD WINNER – Collaboration
Judged by John Bresland

A lonely person unexpectedly takes a journey to reconnect with life.

Jury Statement:
A visual scheme with an admirable tactility and warmth, an unusual and haunted vocal performance, a varied and evocative soundscape – “Underground” rewards repeated viewings by holding nothing back. It’s a complete work.

Prize:
Entre Rios book selection

Credits:
Animated and Directed by Beth Peloff
Music by Dua Saleh

Director Bio:
Beth Peloff is a video maker and teacher who works in both animation and documentary.  Her films have played at film festivals regionally and nationally. She is a 2017 recipient of the Jerome Foundation Film and Video Grant.

Poet Bio:
Dua Saleh is a multidisciplinary performing artist based in Minneapolis. Recently signed to Against Giants, Saleh transcends traditional classifications through art. This work is in direct conversation with people at the margins of reality. Saleh has won the 2017 VERVE Grant, contracts with agencies such as Button Poetry, song premieres with stations such as Minnesota Public Radio, and directing positions with companies like Pillsbury and 20% Theater.

JURY AWARD WINNER – Poetry by Video Artists
Judged by Claudia Castro Luna

The Sine Wave is a short film about trying to understand the ups and downs of life through the mathematical function of the sine wave.

Jury Statement:
The Sine Wave is able to harmonize the animation, cinematography and sound to support the existential concern of the poem. I loved the pacing of this film, the way the images, colors and sounds rendered what would otherwise have been the blank space of the poem. It reminded me of Laurie Anderson’s work, but more, as Goniodsky’s effort is enriched by a luscious visual realm.

Prize:
Pacifica Literary Review subscription

Director Bio:
In my work I attempts to translate obscure reality into visual poetry. I explore a combination of traditional animation techniques including ink and paint on paper, cut-out collage, under the camera animation, 2D computer animation and compositing.

JURY AWARD WINNER – Adaptations/Ekphrasis
Judged by Shawn Levy

Six boys finding their identity, themselves, this is the hardest task.
A film by Helmie Stil based on Dom Bury’s poem The Opened Field.

Jury Statement:
“The Opened Field” moves like a dream: vaguely of this earth, this reality, this logic, but essentially creating and inhabiting a world and a sense of its own.  It seems close enough to our shared mortal life that we wish to impose our minds on it, but it moves away, creating rhythms and poetries out of the spaces between and beyond rational thought.  And it inhabits a cinematic space in sync with the linguistic space of Dom Bury’s poem. “The Opened Field” haunted me like a mystery I will always be on the edge of solving and never fully comprehend.

Prize:
Seattle Small Press bundle, including books from publishers Dock Street, Two Sylvias, Hummingbird Press, Floating Bridge

Director Bio:
I’m a Dutch award-winning filmmaker living and working in the UK. After graduating at the Utrecht School of Arts I’ve been researching, directing and producing my own films since 2006. I love making poetic documentaries and film poems.

My award winning documentaries and film poems have been shown on national television and international film festivals. My film The Desktop Metaphor won the Weimar Poetry Film Award 2018.

I am the director and founder of poetrycinema – films inspired by poetry.

Poetrycinema in association with The Poetry Society commissioned my latest film The Opened Field, which premiered on National Poetry Day 2018 at Southbank London and will be screened and promoted in America as part of Season 9 motionpoems in 2019.

I also organised the Filmpoem Festival 2017 at the independent Depot cinema in Lewes.

www.helmiestil.nl

JURY AWARD WINNER – Video by Poets
Judged by Sarah Minor

Excerpt of five micro-films that are companions to poems in the book OZARK CROWS (Spuyten-Duyvil Press, 2018).

Jury Statement:
It captures the perspective of a collective “I” using a style that layers text, video, animation, and sound. A chorus of crows sings the story to us while, above the footage, the corners of a graphics frame tug and dilate to reveal a singular hand behind the work. “Don’t travel beyond the reach of my voice” says a group of crows designed to remind us of the way all shapes recall sound. “Ozark Crows” is actually “5 microfilms” that combine, the way pages do, to teach us how books still inform the way we make and watch video. The project may be asking us to see the screen as both a page and a window—and when the cursor drags a crow silhouette across, that crow might be writing, and flying.

Prize:
Poetry Northwest subscription

Director Bio:
My writing, film or visual work has appeared in The New Yorker, Agni, December, Harvard Review, Bomb, Boston Review, Magma, Poetry Film Live, and many other journals. My sixth collection is How Much Of What Falls Will Be Left When It Gets To The Ground? (Tolsun Books, 2018). Among my previous books are Ozark Crows (Spuyten-Duyvil, 2018), Spoke & Dark (Red Hen, 2012), winner of the To The Lighthouse/A Room Of Her Own Prize, and Spine (Parlor Press, 2016).