Five years ago today, I posted the first video to Moving Poems — a clay-on-glass animation by Lynn Tomlinson of Emily Dickinson’s “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” — and the site was born. The brash site description, “The best poetry videos on the web,” was meant largely as a joke on self-serious websites obsessed with search-engine optimization. As best as I can recall, I anticipated spending a month or two posting all the cool poetry videos I was aware of, and letting it go at that. I really just wanted to get them all in one place, largely for my own convenience. Ha!

So here we are. I don’t have the stomach for a long, boastful list of accomplishments, because I am painfully aware of all the things I’ve done wrong or could be doing better. I will say that to the extent that this site has helped expand filmmakers’ and poets’ horizons and led them to create new multimedia works, to network more effectively, and even to create new videopoetry/filmpoetry/cinepoetry-related events that might not have happened otherwise, I am enormously gratified. I continue to be astonished by the breadth and quality of poetry videos that all you filmmakers, video artists, film students and remix geniuses are uploading to the web every day. Since the main site consists entirely of embedded media, it is literally the case, and not the usual bollocks you hear in these kinds of statements, that I couldn’t have done any of this without you. So thanks for sharing your work with the world, and please keep it coming.

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Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.

davebonta.com

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