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Sarah James/Leavesley is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. Nine out of ten of her solo poetry titles have won or been shortlisted/highly commended for an award. Her latest collection, Darling Blue (Indigo Dreams, 2025) was joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize 2024 and interweaves Pre-Raphaelite-inspired poems with a book-length fictional poetry narrative of love, lust and letting go. Meanwhile, her many individual poem competition wins include the Pre-Raphaelite Society’s Poetry Prize 2024. Author of a touring poetry-play, an ACE-funded multi-media hypertext poetry narrative > Room and two novellas, she also runs V. Press, publishing poetry and flash fiction.
As a photographer, Sarah loves working with light, shadows and movement, especially when she can combine this with poetry or walking – capturing life in passing, then playing with it. She was The High Window Resident Artist in 2019 and is delighted to be back again this year. Sarah also designs book covers for V. Press and has recently started a Substack, reedlike: whispering through wind & water. Substack: https://substack.com/@moresarah. Websites: www.sarah-james.co.uk and https://vpresspoetry.blogspot.com/.
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PICTURE THIS IN MOTION – ANIMATED POETRY
I’m really delighted to be back as an artist-in-residence for The High Window and I’m going to start my first slot with some work that follows on from my last 2019 piece. In ‘Looking Back’, I ended with an erasure poem created as an animated gif. I want to continue with some new animated poetry gifs, this time considering them as a potential half-/part-way form towards poetryfilm.
ANTI DOTE is an eco-photo-poem written specifically to be used with still or moving imagery. Line breaks and white (or petal) space are very different to how I initially jotted my draft text. The words always had to adapt themselves to the flower’s shape, but, in the animated form, I was able to match the poem’s shape with visual elements that give a sense of both the shifting seasons and environmental damage.
Obliteration of some words embodies eco-damage as well as the seasons’ different aspects. Winter is the only season bare enough to catch all the words, but then the words are gone, before they can be properly read. Time (and time for action) is fleeting. Unlike the environmental damage being done.
For those, who’d prefer the image to still enough to be able to read the whole poem, it can be found below. The words focus on what there is to love in nature, the ghostly flower image on its loss/damage, with the title intended to signify what nature gives me (against eg stress) and what is needed to tackle environmental damage.
The keen-eyed may have spotted that this animation’s autumn leaf is the same as used for my opening visual haibun in ‘Looking Back’ .
One of the things that appeals to me about photo-poems, animated gifs and poetryfilm is the number of different combinations possible, many becoming alternative versions of a single text that can feel like completely fresh pieces.
To promote my new collection Darling Blue (Indigo Dreams, 2025), I created an animated gif version of my poem ‘Dear Blue 1’.
Again, the drawing/image shapes meant I had to change the poem’s layout compared to the comparatively straight-forward right-aligned text in the book.
The experience of the two is different and reader-viewers may prefer one over the other. What the animated gif brings to the table, for me, is capturing a little of the art-like nature of this collection. (Darling Blue interweaves poems inspired by Pre-Raphaelite art with a book-length fictional poetry narrative of love, lust and letting go.)
My example here is from the fictional poetry narrative rather than art-inspired because to do something visual for an ekphrastic poem, I’d have needed to use artwork referenced in the piece, or at least something heavily influenced by it.
Those viewing on a phone might choose to rotate their mobile for the second image to help reading, almost as if it were an art object, perhaps. That part still remains difficult to read but, for me, captures the nature of the love affair, the narrator not actually being able to write to her lover and the pointlessness of even trying to do so in her head. Hopefully, the first and third images, which are easier to read over several loops of the animation, still give enough for this version of the poem to hold together. And if they don’t, again that’s not unlike the difficulty of such a relationship.
Of course, it’s possible to get all this from reading the straight-forward text. But, as a writer-photographer, I like that both versions are possible and offer a distinct experience.
As part of my artist slot, I wanted to write a completely new poem specifically for The High Window. Taking the magazine’s name as inspiration, I started to jot down potential lines, while making a list of photos that might work with each new idea. Once I had a basic draft, I also re-read the Philip Larkin poem ‘High Windows ’ to check how my piece might fit within and outside of that framing.
I’m going to give you my poem text first this time, then talk about what was involved in turning this into a gif animation.
Through The High Window
“[…] comes the thought of high windows:”
Philip Larkin, ‘High Windows’
How high is high? is always my first question.
Level with the sunlight and almost touching
the sky – assuming it’s a place to reach for
rather than somewhere to leap or fall from…
But when is high ever high enough?
Flying with kites, doped on the stars,
wired like the moon balancing on
an electric tightrope between pylons…
Climbing the tallest, wildest mountains,
perhaps, pressed cheek to cheek with hard
rockfaces, up and on, hammering in pins,
on and up until the very idea of framed glass
becomes thinner than air, as ungraspable
as… Scaling a dream before it’s dreamt.
Or once woken. Head fully in the clouds,
breathing raindrops before they form,
night breaking into day, illuminating
a matchstick forest below where some poet
might be waiting for inspiration to spark
into flame… Still not high enough to not
feel the heat of a world that’s already
burning. Too many fires now. Impossible
to stop the smoke rising higher and higher
as our singed fingertips betray us.
The photos I had amassed to work with were a mixture of portrait and landscape, so I chose an almost square shape as a compromise that would hopefully allow me to keep the most important elements of each picture regardless of its original shape.
I sorted them into potentials for each stanza, then started to add the words. As I didn’t have enough width to slot in whole lines and the text remain legible, I decided by the second line that I would fit text as necessary for the picture but keep some sense of the line on the page by using one photo per line. As the animation speed is the same between each image, this can really emphasise the fact that longer lines tend to have to be read at a faster pace, and shorter ones more slowly.
The process of matching lines and images using this one line per image meant I had to discard some stanza’s possible pictures because I had too many, move others around and create a few new ones. This gif moves slower than others here because, this time, I did want it to be possible to read all the words in one or just a few loops of the animation.
Is the animated poem an accurate translation of the poem on the page? I’d probably say no. The initial images pay more attention to part of the context or Larkin’s poem but the 4-line stanzas structure is less evident. I think the photos also highlight the environmental focus earlier than that point in the text alone. This is partly because of the nature elements in the selected pictures but also because the animated gif form distorts the original quality of some individual photos, potentially mirroring environmental damage.
I opened this post with a piece that points towards my next artist slot in its autumn images and my mention of animated gifs as moving towards poetryfilm. I’ll pick this idea up again then. Meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed these pieces and maybe even feel inspired to create your own…
The High Window 