Working Order

Editor’s Note

The following pages contain stills from a visual interpretation of Dora Malech’s poem “Working Order” (page 115), produced by Motionpoems and Gentleman Scholar. Motionpoems, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit poetry film company, seeks to broaden the audience for poetry by producing and distributing short film adaptations, or “motionpoems,” of contemporary American poems. The organization selects poems from partnering publishers’ forthcoming titles and offers them to a network of filmmakers. The resulting films are released monthly in mainstream media, blogs, Youtube, international film festivals, art galleries, and on motionpoems. com. They also screen at festivals, cinemas, libraries, museums, bookstores, and schools. For “Working Order,” Motionpoems partnered with the production company Gentleman Scholar, which describes itself as “a team of solution-driven artists who specialize in strategy, live-action production, animation, digital, and print.” “Allowed full creative freedom,” writes Gentleman Scholar, “we loved running with our imaginations and pushing the envelope with striking hand-painted imagery and hints of psychedelia. The result is an interpretation of Dora Malech’s ‘Working Order’ that takes the viewer on a surreal, exploratory journey into a woman’s introspective psyche.” Watch the film at gentlemanscholar.com/works/motionpoems-workingorder/.