April 15 puts us right in the middle of National Poetry Month. That makes it as good of a time as any to begin Cadence: Video Poetry Festival 2020. I mean, it’s not like you have anywhere else to go.

Seriously, though, the Video Poetry Festival sounds like a really cool thing to take advantage of at home. The NW Film Forum is bearish on the small festival, as their executive director, Vivian Hua, told me a couple of weeks ago that it’s a “big, exciting opportunity,” and “I think that festival is going to be pretty great to bring online this year because the program is so international and it’s highly curated: we get hundreds of submissions from all over the world.”

The festival was curated by author and poet Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and Rana San, in collaboration with the NWFF.

Here are the details, from the program NWFF sent out:

Cadence, the only festival dedicated to video poetry in the PNW, fosters critical and creative growth around its genre. This year we will host five online showcases of short video poetry works by 83 artists from 20 different countries, selected from an open call for submissions and solicitations. In 2020, Cadence is moving online for the first time, in response to Washington State’s Stay Home, Stay Safe mandate. APR. 12–19  • 3–8pm | Common Area Maintenance: Video Poetry Showcase On view in the window of Common Area Maintenance (2125 2nd Ave, between Blanchard & Lenora) every evening from April 12–19, this looping selection of video poetry is dedicated to wanderers, strollers, and skaters seeking a poetic interruption. WEDNESDAY, APR. 15 • 7:30pm | Sight Lines – In partnership with Henry Art Gallery Direct and unobstructed, the video poetry in this screening opens lines of sight into narratives, communities, and hidden histories through overlooked voices and untold stories. The Henry Art Gallery and NWFF co-present the In Plain Sight Film Series [Online] on the occasion of the Henry’s exhibition, In Plain Sight. This series’ programs explore the myriad shades of nuance in disciplinary synthesis and delight in the unearthing of new relationships between poetry, artifactology, and cinema. THURSDAY, APR. 16  • 7:30pm | Pivot Turn Volta, or the turn that shifts a poem’s emotional tension, manifests physically inside these video poems as actual pirouette. Interspersing movement-based video poetry are works utilizing a more conventional poetic turn; shifting from scientific to familial, from catastrophic to celebratory, inside of animations or submerged in watery memories. FRIDAY, APR. 17  • 7:30pm | Breaking the Line – Sponsored by Entre Rios Books Enjambment carries an idea across a line without punctuation, but with a shift in meaning. These video poems deal with themes of breaking from the past personally, politically, poetically, to become something new – whether subtly or drastically. These pieces take meaning from the negative space of the line break. SATURDAY, APR. 18  • 7:30pm | Better Left Unsaid Not silent, these video poems emphasize language as an auditory, graphic, or cultural experience. Emotional threads through found and filmed footage leave room for inference and poetic impressions. SUNDAY, APR. 19  • 7:30pm | End Times The current apocalypse, the post-apocalypse, your personal apocalypse—video poems in this screening address endings. Through premonitions and memories of a dire past, these works draw our attention to how they end – with the end of an era, the end of a species, or the end of the world.