Moving Poems

The Most Beautiful Sea

Abstract

The video essay The Most Beautiful Sea comes out of my Moving Poems project, a small (but growing) online collection of videos that features poetic texts, specifically in response to the following prompt: make a short video in which you pair a single poem (or parts of a poem) or multiple poems with a single or multiple moving-image media text(s) (a film, a TV show, an online video, etc.). I consider it an explorative and a pedagogical tool, which does not assume a specific output, but which prompts students and video makers to approach the relationship between literature and audiovisual images in a new, digitally tactile way. As such, it might expand our ideas of the “poetic mode” in videographic criticism from an aesthetic to an interdisciplinary and methodological approach.