Analyzing Video Poems

Video poetry is a new medium. With the advent of affordable video editing on a wide scale in homes and schools, we can expect to see a great deal more of it as time goes on. The conventions of the medium are still in flux; perhaps they always will be.

Print out the features chart below and use it to look for instances of each of the qualities listed in the first column. Each letter at the top of the columns is a link to a specific poem. There are additional blank rows for you to use for additional qualities as they occur to you. In each cell, put a 0, +, or ++ to indicate whether each poem has that quality not at all, a little or a lot. When we're finished, we'll look over the chart to see what patterns we can discern.

Overarching question: Which three poems did you find most effective? Why?

© 2004 - Bernie Dodge. Write for permission to use elsewhere.