Book Trailers

When making a book trailer for a novel it can be parallel to a movie trailers. In other words, there is some pitched story with a tension point, a narrative arc that can be raided for the one-minute summary hook.
A poem may have a story such as Heather Haley’s poem “Purple Lipstick.”

It may take the form of a montage of video. (That one incidentally took the 3rd in the Zebra International Poetry Film Festival in Berlin). Other of her video poems are mini movies.
When it’s a poetry book, or a poem, there may not be a narrative arc. What do you point at instead visually, across media from visual silence of page to animated color and recorded sound? If the video version is the same as the poem exactly, read aloud what’s the added value? If you want to sell duct tape, package it with Red Green Cd or visa versa. If you build on the page-text ekphrastically it should stand alone, but what’s there to hook back to sell the page-text?
Do you pick one key poem, one part of poem and expand it out, or make another work that speaks to the entire unit of book?
The constraints are on visual image or palette, written form, how it relates to page-form, sound (non-verbal) and audio words.
Nadia Brown’s video poem for her collection had music and scrolling blurbs and her resume top points but not a sample of her writing directly. Some poetry trailers do some Star Wars text flying away that you read, with or without the writer reading in the background. Some do a sort of powerpoint visual as there’s a straight audio track of the poet reading.

Sina Queyras’ book Expressway took a different tack with showing the lines of poetry and intercutting still images that pointed out the message of the book. The text and images reinforced each other and emphasized the line and concepts. The audio was a soundtrack of rock music along the same theme.

Another route is for a sample poems to be read by the writer. Christian Bök did a trailer 8 minutes long with a slideshow with one photo for each word, some of these adding a second meaning in a different direction. One pays attention for the little double-meaning turns he makes with his illustrations — such as the word bliss paired with a pug dog with ears in big pink rollars, or in Firth (meaning geography) pictured with some actor presumably named Firth. It aimed to amuse all the way thru and you needed the visual and the sound.

Austin Keon took the approach of showing his process of how he made blackout poems and interspersed that with news blurbs of how people liked it. His video was on fast-forward matching the pace of the music. It didn’t illustrate any poem in particular.

A short poetry video of the poem “Moon Baboon Canoe” by Gary Barwin takes the medium and digitally manipulates the text of the poem and leaves the visual static. Although not for a book in particular it focuses down to the level of one poem in particular.
So many ways and means. From so far as I saw, poetry book trailers run about the same length as novel trailers — one to two minutes. A commercial for a book. It’s funny that we are used to commercials for everything else yet this is relatively new.