This piece ran on 1/1/2014 in Poets & Writers

Within two weeks of meeting poet Todd Boss, in the fall of 2008, filmmaker Angella Kassube had created a forty-second animated exploration of Boss’s poem “Constellations” that featured twined hands, star maps, and excerpts of the text in motion, all set against the audio backdrop of Boss’s reading of the poem. The two teamed up soon thereafter to cofound the Minneapolis-based poetry and film collaborative Motionpoems, which has since produced dozens of such films—each created by Boss and Kassube with the help of dozens of freelance filmmakers—bringing works by both emerging and established poets to life. The team is currently working on its fifth annual season of films, which will be released this spring.

“It’s not just a poem in a literary journal anymore,” Boss says. “It’s something you can share and people can get absorbed in, in a totally new way.”

(read full text)