The Festival of Visualized Poetry was launched in March 2008 by PoetryVisualized.com as its initial effort at promoting interest in visual poetry over the internet. The festival is open to anyone who can produce a Video Poem, a format of poetic expression which combines a poem with sounds, music and visual images. Poetryvisualized.com is itself a recently launched website which focuses primarily on showcasing Video Poems, and whose stated goal is to promote visualized poetry as an emerging genre in the renaissance of poetry in the 21st Century. In many ways, we are like YouTube, except that we specialize in presenting poetry combined with music and images says Tansel Yilmaz, one of the website's founders.

The Festival will be for a period of at least six months and could be extended up to one year. The winning entries will be included in a feature film documentary on visualized poetry which will be produced and released in DVD. It could also be released through television and submitted to film festivals, according to Rod Underhill, the Chief Visionary Officer and General Counsel of PoetryVisualized.com. Mr. Underhill, who is also one of the original founders of the widely successful MP3.com says the festival provides an opportunity for budding, new artists, poets, film directors and producers to get their works published by becoming part of a documentary film project which will be submitted to film festivals, released through television and sold to the public as DVDs.

Participation is open to the public, 18 years and older. The poems can be original composition, or previously published poetry. There is so much material out there, already in the public domain that can be used in this contest from the works of William Shakespeare, to Robert Frost, or Edgar Allan Poe, that one does not have to be a poet to participate says Rod Underhill. You do need to have the visionary creativity and imagination of a poet combined with the talent for video editing and production – the kind of stuff a lot of people already do on YouTube, Mr. Underhill adds. The subject is open on a wide ranging category from love to social commentary. It should be produced as a Video Poem or Visualized Poem, (VPoem, for short), from 1 to 10 minutes in length, in which the poem is read with accompanying sounds, music, and visual images. The images can be still photographs, videos, graphics, animation or a combination of all, where imagery projects the message of poem as interpreted by the artist.

Submission of entries starts this week through direct uploads to its website, [link]. Entries can also be submitted by mail in DVD/CD/VD on standard, popular video file formats (Quick Time, AVI, swf, wmv, flv, mpeg, rm, vob, 3gp, asf.) to 1424 East 2nd Street #2, Long Beach, CA, 90802