Dancing About Poetry

Cadence Video Poetry Festival takes the poem off the page

Amanda Manitach•April 10, 2025

Rana San and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke. PHOTO BY MAAYAN HAIM

We eat with our eyes first; that’s how scientists say we consume food. But these days, it’s not just food. Everything is consumed through visual language.

So, what happens when poems are loosed from the page, unbound, and eaten as imagery?

Such is the purview of video poetry, a young genre that’s been evolving and growing in popularity since the late ’70s. As one might infer from the name, this hybrid art form takes poetry into the realm of moving image, creating a multidimensional experience that extends beyond the traditional reading of text on page. Beyond that, the definition of “video poem” is a bit slippery: Some are wildly experimental films. Some are shot on phones, others on 16 mm film. Some are filled with voices reciting lines aloud. In some, the poem seems barely there, words muttered, melting, or absent altogether and only implied—such as when a poem is translated into dance.

Whatever form it takes, Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and Rana San are ready for you to devour poetry in a newfangled way. As the founders of Cadence Video Poetry Festival, the two have been gathering the best of video poetry from around town and around the world for the past eight years, carefully curating it for consumption. It is on view each April, in conjunction with National Poetry Month, at Northwest Film Forum, where in-person screenings are held for three days. For those unable to attend (or who’d rather enjoy from home), Cadence offers an online viewing experience.

“In the early days of the festival, we’d have to really work at explaining what video poetry was in order for people to understand what they were coming to,” says Werner-Jatzke. “We've made enough headway to the point that now, people just come. They know they don't know what they're going to see, and they're excited about that. If we’re being honest,” she adds, “we couldn't really describe it to them if we tried.”

On one morning this past March, Werner-Jatzke and San gathered over tea and lattes to reminisce about the formative years. The idea for the festival was hatched over lunch at Little Uncle in Capitol Hill in 2019, they explain. Though technically, it was born in 2016, out of an identity crisis.

“I came at this from a place of writing,” Werner-Jatzke says. “I have two degrees in creative writing. That's really where I was at. I was like I'm a writer.”

A summer artist residency at Cornish College of the Arts changed that. Led by video artist and curator Julia Greenway, she was given access to a studio and screen printing facility, where she began printing her text onto textiles. Unsure where to go from there (lit journals don’t accept submissions of poetry on bedsheets), she used the material to make a five-minute single-channel video, IDK, created in collaboration with Shaun Kardinal. When it was screened in a group show at the now-defunct Cairo, the experience of observing other people absorb her writing that way was revelatory. She wanted more video poetry, but there wasn’t anywhere to show it—or see it.

“I thought, This is something the Film Forum would do,” she says. “Because, you know, Seattle is the sort of place where, If you want something to exist, you have to make it.”

San, a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on storytelling through film, writing, and movement, had recently been brought on as the community programmer at NWFF, where it was her job to hear out ideas and find ways to engage the community. Werner-Jatzke pitched her over pad thai; San was all in.

When she agreed to help host a Seattle video poetry festival, San didn’t realize she’d be launching a decade-long project—or making a best friend. But the two fell down the rabbit hole together, perhaps never to emerge.

“When you combine those three elements—the text, the visual, and the audio—a new impact is created,” says San. “You're not just showing what you're saying. You’re putting somebody into a place—or you’re removing them—so that they can grasp the larger abstract text. You uproot the viewer, or you disorient them with the visuals. You can do anything you want to.

“Something that really lights me up about video poetry is that most of us have devices that can film,” Werner-Jatzke says. “From the perspective of the maker, it’s an incredibly accessible tool. Also that you can create something that is lasting beyond just the page. Something that can be sent around the world and shown in so many different settings. It’s something that really exists outside of time.”

There are pockets of other video poetry festivals around the world, like ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, as well as long-running festivals in Athens, Vienna, and New Zealand. As San and Werner-Jatzke researched and reached out to other organizers, they found that a lot of them were screening the same pool of work. With Cadence, they wanted to break away from that and hunt out video poems in unexpected places, testing the limits of what is considered poetry.

In Cadence’s first year, they screened collections of work by local Northwest artists, along with a showcase that traced the history of video poetry, going as far back as Ian Hugo’s 1952 trippy-as-hell experimental short, Belles of Atlantis, which features the voice and words of Anaïs Nin. For their inaugural festival, they also brought in Canadian poet Tom Konyves, who first coined the term videopoetry in 1978 and later wrote a manifesto on the subject in 2011.

Cadence notably doesn’t require submitted work to be recent—something that sets it apart from most festivals.

“A film can be made at any time, and it can be viewed any time,” says San. ”There's something really lovely about those kinds of works being able to find new audiences at any point in time.”

Since 2018, Cadence has evolved; the first year, they recruited work mostly by word of mouth and a lot of emailing, and now submissions are received through Film Freeway. A small submission fee ensures that every artist who’s featured ends up receiving payment for their work, even if modest.

The programming has evolved as well; in the early years, they experimented with “weirder” off-site formats that didn’t quite take, like screening video poems in a rental tent in downtown Seattle. This year, they are screening off-site at Frye Art Museum (April 24) and very off-site at Guild Cinema in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Cadence also offers workshops—last year, they held a class on turning risograph prints into animations—and hosts an artist-in-residence program at the Forum.

When it comes to the offseason…there really is none for Werner-Jatzke and San. They both also co-curate Good Symptom: A Serial Anthology of Time-Based Disturbances, published by The 3rd Thing, an independent press that provides year-round video poetry subscriptions delivered to your screen. The rabbit hole goes deep.

“Even today, people are coming to us, saying, ‘I didn't know that what I was making was this thing,’” Werner-Jatzke says with a sparkle. “Then they discover that there are so many other people making it. It’s so important to us, to give it a place to exist.”