Above is a trailer featuring short excerpts from the over forty poetry videos made in 2023 and 2024 by post-secondary students and two high school students for the City Poems Project.

In 2023, students enrolled in these pre-selected local public post-secondary courses participated in making poetry videos for the City Poems Poetry Video 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.

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.)

To see the 34 videos visit the VPL’s YouTube Playlist 2023 for the City Poems Contest OR refer to the table below at the bottom of this page. (See photos and names of the students from the award-winning teams here.)

Judging Criteria

Judge Heather Haley selected 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 for the Audience Choice Awards which was from April 26-May 25 (5pm PT) has ended, but you can continue to view all the student poetry videos online.)

Awards and Screenings

There was also a public screening of a curated set of 13 of student poetry videos (a combination of nonfinalists and finalists, along with two Youth Poets’ videos) with the Word Vancouver Festival 2023 at UBC Robson Square. Several of the poetry videos are being screened on the Mount Pleasant Community Arts Screen in 2024-2025, and were included as part of an online City Poems program with Houston’s REELpoetry festival in April 2024. Student teams were strongly encouraged to submit their poetry videos to other festivals, which has led to some videos being selected screenings in Banff, Milan, Seattle, and Wellington, New Zealand.

[After the contest was over, a new set of 9 poetry videos was made based on 5 other local poems in 2024 with SFU IAT 344 that are available for view on the VPL’S YouTube Playlist 2024. These were screened at the Vancouver Public Library on April 4, 2024. They are not included in the table below.]

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 🥈2nd PLACE
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 🥇  1st PLACE 🟢 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) 💐 Audience Choice 🔴 Entry #1016 ⭐ Honourable Mention 🟢Entry #1031
The Garden, Echoes I by Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li Text of Poem	Location: Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden “The poem explores the lingering echoes of gardens for a young women recovering from grief and in a search for home.”	Trailer available here
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 ⭐ Honourable Mention 🔵  Entry #1028 💐 Audience Choice 🔵 Entry #1033 🏆 Best Visual Storytelling
Near Commercial by Max (formerly 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 ⭐ Honourable Mention 🔴 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 🥉 3rd PLACE 🟢 Entry #1030 🏆 Best Animation 💐 Audience Choice
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    “This poem is about an otter [who was famous in the news] 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 🏆 Best Documentary 🟢 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 🥈2nd PLACE 🔴 Entry #1038