Playpoem Verse Five

Playpoem Verse Five is the fifth in a series of eleven short videos originally presented as a 4‑channel video installation titled Playpoem/Poème-jeu. This series by visual artist Karen Trask is inspired by Virginia Woolf’s most loved and experimental novel, The Waves. The author referred to this work, published in 1931, as her playpoem. With Playpoem, Karen Trask is imagining herself as Virginia Woolf with a camera and a desire to play with fragments of text, the human body, the tide, the ocean and the land. In Verse Five, a net she made of paper thread spun from dictionary pages floats on the surface of the ocean.