Cadence Video Poetry Festival comes but once a year, and yes, it might fall on a glorious April afternoon with the sun out (emphasis on might) and cherry blossoms calling, but trust me on this—get your butt in a seat in the dark, cavernous Northwest Film Forum this weekend to devour some video poems.

What is a video poem? It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a video that is a poem, a poem that has moved off the page and become a multisensory experience, the marriage of moving image, text, and sound.

The hybrid genre is relatively new, gaining popularity in the late 1970s with the help of Canadian poet Tom Konyves, who coined the term videopoetry in 1978 (he went on to write a manifesto on the subject in 2011). However, works considered to fall under the umbrella of video poetry go back further, one of the earliest being Ian Hugo’s 1952 experimental short Bells of Atlantis, which features the voice of wife Anaïs Nin reading from her prose-poem novella House of Incest, accompanied by a very trippy soundtrack by electronic music pioneers Bebe and Louis Barron.

The video poem is a near-perfect art vehicle for a number of reasons, not least of which is its relative brevity—bite-size pieces of art tailored to our atrophied attention spans conditioned to consume the world through video shorts. But in contrast to slop, video poems pack artistic density into perfect little parcels. Apart from the requirement that the video dance with language in some way, what constitutes a video poem is wildly broad, and the aesthetic can be all over the place: some are shot on phones, others on 16 mm film. Some are deliciously abstract, while others read more like short films.

There are video poetry festivals all over the world now—Berlin, Athens, Vienna, and New Zealand have some big ones. In Seattle, Cadence Video Poetry Festival has been going strong for nearly a decade, formed by Seattle artists/poets Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and Rana San, who conceived the idea for a festival over lunch at Little Uncle in Capitol Hill one fateful day in 2017. Since then, it has been held annually at Northwest Film Forum during National Poetry Month (April). They also offer an online viewing pass that grants access to each showcase (there are five) from the comfort of your screen and couch. But trust me on this: get a ticket to see it in person. (Get off your phone!) 

“This year’s festival focuses strongly on interdependence and mutual reliance,” says Werner-Jatzke. “Across the showcases, this theme appears in poems about lineage, ecology, displacement, race, and aging. This throughline is one that we hope will have a ripple effect of its own and inspire the shared responsibility and vulnerability that so many of these video poems embrace.”

Let’s face it: the world is on fire, so if the tone feels a tad morose, maybe we can mourn together in a dark room. But I also promise these works hit in a way that feels like balm, as only art can. If you can see just one, I recommend catching the Friday opening-night showcase “you flew from my eyes.”

This year, Cadence is also offering two off-site satellite screenings in town: “ceaseless, of the earth” at Frye Art Museum (April 30, 6–8 p.m.) and “imagine a mountain running” at Seattle Art Museum (free, July 2, 5–8 p.m.).

Cadence Video Poetry Festival takes place April 17–19 at NWFF, and April 17–30 (online-only).