Students enrolled in these pre-selected local public post-secondary courses participated in making poetry videos for the City Poems Contest:

🔴   SFU IAT 344 (Moving Images)
🔵   UBC FNIS 454 (Indigenous New Media)
🟢   ECUAD 2DN 211 (2D Animation)
🟢   ECUAD Foundation 160 (Core Media Studio)

The student teams selected poems from a list of adult finalists’ poems from Stage One of the Contest, supplemented by notable site-based poems of a few other culturally significant sites. To see the videos visit the VPL’s YouTube Playlist for the City Poems Contest OR visit the City Poems Poetry Video Contest page on this website.

Adult poets whose poems were shortlisted in Stage One could also participate in the contest by collaborating with local public post-secondary students of their choice. (Youth Poetry finalists from Stage One had the opportunity to participate in a workshop to make their own poetry videos, which are not part of Stage 2 of the Contest.)

Judging Criteria

Judge Heather Haley is judging the top 3 poetry videos according to these criteria:

1. Artistically deepens, extends and/or transforms the meaning of the poems through the synergy of sound, text, and/or image.
2. Demonstrates creativity, originality, ingenuity and/or inventiveness.
3. Engages viewers/listeners.  

Online Voting

Poetry videos made by the student teams can be viewed on the City Poems Poetry Video Contest page. OR on the VPL’s YouTube Playlist for the City Poems Contest. Online voting for the Audience Choice Awards was from April 26-May 25 (5pm PT).  Although online Audience Choice voting has ended, the student poetry videos can still be viewed there.

Awards and Screenings

There will be cash prizes for the top 3 winners (First Prize $1000, Second Prize $500 and Third Prize $300). 

There will also be awards for Best Animation, Best Visual Storytelling, and Best Documentary-Style Poetry Video, along with three Honourable Mentions funded by a small grant from TransLink.

There will be an Awards Ceremony at the Museum of Vancouver on June 11, 2023 from 1-3 pm, where the top poetry videos selected by Contest Judge Heather Haley will be announced and screened. Audience choice winners (one from each participating university) will be announced also. Preregister to attend the free public Award ceremony and Screening here.

Please stay tuned for additional public screenings of a curated selection of the student poetry videos at various community venues in future, including at Word Vancouver on Saturday, September 16, 2023!

Poems selected by Student Teams for Poetry videos

POEM	LOCATION & SYNOPSIS	VIDEOS click on the entry #s to watch videos
Alma by Sandra Bruneau Text of Poem	Location: Alma Street Vancouverites, known to demonstrate publicly for various causes, reach out to Ukrainians fighting for their homeland and culture. Alma Street here and the Alma River in Crimea are placenames we share, signifying our common bonds and shared hopes for peace and justice.	🟢 Entry #1032
An Existence That We Can Call Home by James Kim Text of Poem	Location: The First Narrows, by what is now known as Stanley Park and the Lions Gate Bridge This poem is about the gentrification and power imbalances that come about in trying to erase history, and our duty to make sure it’s remembered. (First Nations villages as well as Chinese, Portuguese, Hawaiian and mixed-race communities were forcibly displaced by authorities to make way for what we now know as Stanley Park. (Please read the footnotes to the poem for the history.)	🔴 Entry #1036
Contrasts by Donna Seto Text of Poem	Location: Chinatown A 100 year-old Chinese elder witnesses the changes and gentrification of Chinatown.	🔴 Entry #1008 🔴 Entry #1010 🟢 Entry #1027
Entertainment by Jeremy Chu Text of Poem	Location: The former Marco Polo Restaurant, 90 East Pender St.  The poem in its barest is about the historical presence of The Marco Polo (former famous nightclub in Chinatown), and its importance as a space-of-relation between communities, namely communities of colour.	🔴 Entry #1005 (called Diaspora) 🔴 Entry #1016 🟢Entry #1031
The Garden, Echoes I by Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li Text of Poem	Location: Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden “The Garden, Echoes” explores the lingering echoes of gardens for a young women recovering from grief and in a search for home.	Not available after May 25 due to submission to other festivals
Know Who You Are, and Know Where You Come From by Debra Sparrow Text of Poem	Location: local Musqueam village sites Musqueam weaver, Debra Sparrow remembers how her grandfather would tell her and her children about Musqueam village sites and history.	🔵  Entry #1024 🔵  Entry #1028 🔵 Entry #1033
Near Commercial by Harper Campbell Text of Poem	Location: Commercial Drive This poem is about the poet’s memories of growing up near Commercial drive in the 1990s. It shows certain places and the poet’s memories about them.	🔴 Entry #1007 🟢 Entry #1034
Postcard Home from English Bay by Alex Leslie from their book, Vancouver for Beginners (Book*hug Press, 2019)    Text of Poem	Location: English Bay “I wanted to create a full tableau, including many characters who occupy a vision of oceanfront busy Vancouver, from the seagulls to the politicians to the street artists…. It’s a twisted advertisement, or a dark stream-of-consciousness account someone on a drug trip might write on a postcard… it captures something of the overblown paradise vibes Vancouver is pinned with.”	🔴 Entry #1013 🔴 Entry #1018 🟢 Entry #1026
Sen̓áḵw by Susan Alexander Text of Poem	Location: Seńákw commonly known as Vanier Park The first three stanzas of this poem take the reader to the current site of Sen̓ákw also known as Vanier Park where there is a shifting scene of stunt kites, bicycles, joggers, music, picnickers and Bard on the Beach tents in which the play Lysistrata is being performed. The last three stanzas awaken the settler speaker of the poem, and the reader, to the dark colonial history of Sen̓ákw.	🔴 Entry #1012
the stone artist by Theresa Rogers Text of Poem	Location: Stanley Park Seawall    When you walk along the Stanley Park seawall, so full of its own history, you will come upon cairns sculptured only with stones precariously balanced, yet they often manage to remain for several days, resembling flocks of birds. Only once have I seen an actual artist at work — often is seems it is done in quiet hours while others are not around.	🔴 Entry #1006 🔴 Entry #1015 🔴 Entry #1017 🟢 Entry #1020 🟢 Entry #1021 🟢 Entry #1022 🟢 Entry #1023
This was meant to be for Nora by Junie Desil Text of Poem	Location: Hogan’s Alley   A poem based on a dream about Jimi Hendrix and his grandmother, Nora Hendrix, who was a community leader in Hogan’s Alley, located in the Strathcona neighbourhood of Vancouver. From the early 1900s to the late 1960s, the Strathcona neighbourhood was the home to Vancouver’s first and only black community. Watch video stories of Black Strathcona here.	🔴 Entry #1014 🟢 Entry #1030
To the Otter Who Snuck into the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden and Ate the Koi by Kelsey Andrews  Text of Poem	Location: Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden    “To the Otter Who Snuck into the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden and Ate the Koi” is about the otter, from the point of view of a formerly homeless person who is now living in an SRO, thinking about the similarities and differences between him and the otter.	🔴 Entry #1004 🔴 Entry #1009
Welcome by Sadhu Binning from his bilingual poetry collection No More Watno Dur (Mawenzi House Publishers, 1994) Text of Poem	Location: Coal Harbour  A poem about belonging and exclusion. Read about the history of the SS Komagata Maru in 1914 here, and background to the current civic monument in the park here.	🔴 Entry #1011 🟢 Entry #1029
What Do I Remember of the Evacuation by Joy Kogawa from the graphic poetry book, What Do I Remember of the Evacuation  (Scholastic Education Canada, 1985) and in A Garden of Anchors (Mosaic Publishers, 2003) Text of Poem	Location: Hastings Park and Marpole Reflections and memories of a poet who was forcibly removed and interned as a 6 year-old child along with her Japanese Canadian family in BC in 1942. Please see Canadian Encyclopedia on Japanese Canadian internment and the Hastings Park 1942 website.	🟢 Entry #1025 🔴 Entry #1038