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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 – POETRYFILM
UNTRELLISING ANIMATED GIF IN
Fruitful
Inspired by William Morris’s wallpapers
Which came first? Did he paper
nature’s gardens in his mind
or did the leaves and plants
decorate his house using
thorns as nibs for the earth’s
ink? The tiny yellow-petalled
promises and intoxicated
full blooms of ‘Pimpernel’,
stems twining on and up,
binding closer. The plump
flesh that guests might pluck
from ‘Fruit’, juice running
down their fingers as they slice
a sliver of lime for their gin,
or split open ripe pomegranates
rich with seeds, then swallow
each sweet diamond. I don’t
know how to choose from all
these wallpapers! And yet,
those jays singing out to me
from his ‘Trellis’. Its roses
sneaking up my legs, vining
across my chest and arms,
then squeezing my heart tight,
digging in the thorns that started
these designs. Pointless to resist –
without this pattern, there might
be nothing except bare rooms
with no gardens, fields or hedgerows.
This poem won The Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Prize 2025 and was first published in PRS Review.
In my previous resident-artist feature, I talked about animated gifs as a potential part-way form between poetry on the page and poetryfilm. My opening animated gif and poem text are separate here because poetryfilm involves a third element to juggle: audio, often a recording of the poem being read, perhaps with some background music or sound-effects.
For audience accessibility, I often include words on screen in my films but considering the visuals and poem separately first can be useful. It allows me to evaluate each part on its own, then work out if they can be integrated together with an audio recording, how to best do that and what alterations might be needed.
We tend to read slower than words are spoken. In poetryfilm with words on screen, this means adjusting the way the poem’s read, compromising on how long text appears on screen for and/or deciding to deliberately not sync the two, for effects of dissonance, perhaps, or to make the viewer-listener pay more attention.
I never put the examples above together into a poetryfilm because I felt they worked better separately. The complete set of frames used in the animated gif would have had to loop many times, or I’d have had to create many more frames, for it to even come close to the audio length of this poem.
My next poetryfilm doesn’t build on an earlier animated gif form for that reason. But it is mostly created from still photographs, creating movement through the on-screen words, a few special effects and changing/adding visual elements in a fairly fast way, borrowing techniques not dissimilar to those used for animated gifs or stop-frame animations.
THE NUTRITIONIST’S NIGHT OUT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mkhmc4xkY
The Nutritionist’s Night Out highlights some of what I’ve mentioned about text and audio. Like animated gifs, the motion also isn’t as slick as in actual stop-frame animations. But it wasn’t intended to be. This piece was inspired by a poetryfilm night at Verve Poetry Festival 2024, when one of the films had the audience laughing and I realised it was the first time I’d watched a poetryfilm do that. Yet, humour works well at spoken word nights. I thought, Why isn’t there more of this?
Combining elements of stop-frame animation with straight-forward photos/video might not have worked in a more serious poetryfilm, but it seemed to complement the surreal and humorous aspects in a piece intended to be light-hearted/funny as well as poignant. For me, the not-always-quite-matching pace of the audio and on-screen words is part of that humorous approach, as well as embodying unvoiced thoughts, drunkenness and the general dis-sync between the nutritionist in her professional role, advising others, and the reality of her life when that surface appearance slips.
As is probably already obvious, my creative practice is hugely influenced by photography. It also builds on my initial experience of poetryfilm more than 25 years ago. This was in the form of a small selection of pieces on a DVD that I can no longer play on my television. In those days, Zata Banks was the only poetryfilm-maker I was aware of, holding screenings in London. I’m not sure her PoetryFilm project [https://poetryfilm.org/] and archive had even officially begun at that point and the internet itself was only just starting towards becoming mainstream. I was fairly new to writing poetry then too and what I most remember about those first poetryfilms I watched was my surprise at how few of them contained words/poetry, just beautiful shots. This was probably the first time I encountered the idea of totally visual poetry – the poetry being in the actual images and their movement.
Fast-forward to now and tech has changed a lot, as has poetryfilm. While there’s still strong emphasis on the visual elements, it’s much easier to find poetryfilms with lines of poetry that hold, or could hold, their place on the page too. My ultimate personal aim is to achieve beautiful poetry with the visuals as well as the poem itself, minimising any compromises needed to blend the two together.
You may be asking but why create poetryfilms, given the different skills, time and work involved on top of writing the poems. First, there’s the pure joy of creating, especially if you like visual art as well as poetry. They’re also an alternative way of showcasing your poetry without having to perform or be on-screen yourself. A third stems from this. Poetryfilms can work well within or alongside other events – something for the audience to watch while waiting for live readings to start, or in the background or as an installation (possibly on loop) as part of a poetry and/or art display.
When I launched my new collection Darling Blue [https://www.sarah-james.co.uk/?page_id=17191] (Indigo Dreams, 2025), I used poetryfilm for launches and poet/publisher-in-residence events. What was best about these though, was that I was also able to incorporate pieces by fellow Worcestershire Poetry Society Stanza members, Kathy Gee and Nina Lewis. The combined poetryfilm anthology/screening can be viewed below. Most amazing was how these completely different pieces by different poetryfilm-makers fitted together, despite no prior knowledge of the other pieces that would be used, only the general themes of art, blue and nature.
IN THE EYE OF POETRYFILM SELECTION
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GxnXFWIVmg
After 25+ years writing poetry, the world has changed a great deal, poetry and publishing too. Photo-poems, animated poetry gifs and poetryfilms are just a few developments made possible by the internet and tech advances. At the same time, with AI in the picture, many writers and creatives I know have started to question what that means for them.
I don’t have a definitive answer for myself, let alone anyone else. But there are two core things that I return to. The first, again, is the pure joy of the creative process itself, regardless of likely audience/non-audience. The second is the individual, personal touch involved in both giving and receiving such unique artworks.
My closing piece draws on this and David referring to this issue as his swansong editing the journal. ‘A Swansong’ was written and created especially for David and The High Window readers, writers and creatives – nothing more and very much nothing less!
A SWANSONG ANIMATED GIF IN
This piece also brings me full circle, existing as an animated gif that I then used as the basis for a poetryfilm. The film’s visuals are identical to the shots in the animated gif, just brought together slightly differently.
The first aspect that comparing the two highlights is how some photos/shots may become distorted in animated gif form (as I mentioned in my spring feature [https://thehighwindowpress.com/2026/02/24/the-high-windows-resident-artist-spring-2026/]) – to positive or negative effect.
The second is to do with sound. On the page, my poem is structured with haiku-stanzas. Because of this, the shorter 5-syllable lines fall at the start and end of each stanza, so that the extra pause between stanzas almost evens out to cover the difference in length compared to the 7-syllable lines. It wouldn’t be impossible to read and record the audio to work using just the animated gif version for the film’s visuals, perhaps with a slightly longer duration for each frame in the gif. But lines with enjambment can be trickier to place exactly with enough time to match the text. Reading a poem aloud with feeling/expression also un-evens some lines. I chose therefore to allow some frames to be slightly different lengths and to mark line-ends in the audio by allowing an extra pause in my reading.
A SWANSONG POETRYFILM IN
While the audio here isn’t the natural pace for some enjambed lines when read from the page/in my head, it does honour form and line-end emphasis, which can become blurred and hard to discern in poetryfilm.
Such adaptation may or may not work for you. Either way, both versions of the poem were created for you. Whether you prefer the silent animated gif or the poetryfilm, I hope that you’ve enjoyed this and feel inspired to keep reading, writing, watching and creating!
SOME POETRYFILM LINKS
Ó Bhéal Poetry-film Competition winners, shortlists and archives: https://www.obheal.ie/blog/competition-poetry-film/
Moving Poems – poetry in video form: https://www.movingpoems.com/about/
Liberated Words: https://liberatedwords.com/
Poetry Film Live – poetry film & storytelling as acts of community & resistance: https://www.poetryfilmlive.com/
Sarah’s poetry films/video poetry: https://www.sarah-james.co.uk/?page_id=12178
Sarah’s poems turned into film by other filmmakers: https://www.sarah-james.co.uk/?page_id=13087
The Pre-Raphaelite Society’s website, including art resources and competition details, can be found at: https://www.pre-raphaelitesociety.org/.
The High Window 