~ News and Views ~
New at Awkword Paper Cut: videopoetry contest and a feature on Melissa Diem
Belgian videopoet Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, is behind two features this month at the online magazine Awkword Paper Cut. His monthly column “Swoon’s View” focuses on two films by Irish poet and filmmaker Melissa Diem (also a favorite here at Moving Poems), balancing his critiques with Diem’s own notes about the making of each. It’s always interesting to hear someone who has achieved mastery both as a poet and as a filmmaker describe their creative process. Here, for example, is Diem discussing the second of the two films:
The poem, Appraisal, came about by exploring ideas of alienation and personal identity in relation to others through testing the physical and social world we find ourselves in and by testing the limits within the self. And of course these worlds in turn test us, sometimes relentlessly. It was this aspect of the poem that I wanted to explore in the poetry film. The initial idea came about organically when I was doing a quick frame rate test and Cayley (the little girl in the film) happened to be dancing about the room. We were only half paying attention to each. When I played back the footage I was moved by her expressions, the concentration playing across her face at certain times, her earnestness and innocence as she focused on positioning her small limbs in certain movements. It was that innocence against the great expansiveness of life rushing towards us, with its many tests, that I wanted to capture.
Also this month at Awkword Paper Cut, submissions are open for a unique writing contest: they’re looking for “500 words or less of prose, poetry, or flash fiction to match the video by award winning filmmaker Marc Neys (aka Swoon).”
The submission that best suits the video by Swoon will be selected by a panel of seven judges to be recorded, added to the video and showcased on Awkword Paper Cut including airplay on our Podcast! In addition, the winning submission will also receive membership to The Film Movement’s Film of the Month Club – Offering some of the finest independent filmmaking available! ALSO…Top selection along with runner ups will be featured on the Awkword Paper Cut Podcast!
Here’s the video:
Who wouldn’t want a chance to collaborate on a new videopoem (or videoessay, etc.) with Swoon? Submit by March 31. Details here and complete guidelines here.
“Images which don’t make sense, but seem to fit somehow”: an interview with Othniel Smith
This is the sixth in a series of interviews with poets and remixers who have provided or worked with material from The Poetry Storehouse, a website which collects “great contemporary poems for creative remix.” This interview with Othniel Smith shares a remixer’s perspective. Smith has made the following remixes: “Playing Duets with Heisenberg’s Ghost,” “Dirty Old Man,” “Florid Psychosis,” “Ethics of the Mothers” and “Mundane Dreams.”
1. Would you briefly describe the remix work you have done based on poems from The Poetry Storehouse?
OS: The films I’ve made, inspired by pieces from The Poetry Storehouse, have all been assembled from public domain material made available by The Prelinger Internet Archive and Flickr Commons. I am neither a poet nor a scholar of poetry; thus I fully concede that my interpretations may well be excessively literal. Nor am I a professional video editor, hence the clumsiness.
2. How is The Poetry Storehouse different from or similar to other resources you have used for your remix work?
OS: Most of the poetry films I made before discovering The Poetry Storehouse were based on readings of historic poems (by Shakespeare, Keats, Dickinson, Sandburg etc), taken from sources such as Librivox. Thus I seized on the opportunity to exercise my limited imagination on the work of living poets.
3. What specific elements do you look for when you browse offerings at The Storehouse (or, what is your advice to poets submitting to The Storehouse)?
OS: I’ve simply chosen poems which sparked something off in my mind — no logic involved.
I have no advice to offer to poets in terms of what work to submit, as long as they’re aware that their work may be subject to radical misinterpretation.
4. Talk about how the remixing process comes together for you. For example, does your inspiration start with a poem, or with specific footage for which you then seek a poem?
OS: Usually a phrase in the poem, or its tone as a whole, calls to mind an image from a film. For example, for Peg Duthie’s “Playing Duets With Heisenberg’s Ghost”, it was of a woman blissful and assured at her piano; for David Sullivan’s “Dirty Old Man” it was the innocent face of an adolescent Tuesday Weld. It’s then a matter of seeking out other images which make sense in conjunction with it. Or which don’t make sense, but seem to fit, somehow.
5. Is there anything about the Storehouse process or approach that you feel might with benefit be done differently?
OS: No — it’s an excellent resource. It’s especially interesting to hear poets reading their own words. Hopefully you’ll be able to attract more quality work from all parts of the globe.
6. Is there anything else you would like to say about your Poetry Storehouse experience (or anything else)?
OS: I’m just pleased that the poets whose work I’ve tackled don’t seem to have been overly offended (or if they have, they’ve been very polite about it).
New at Moving Poems: related post links
I’m testing out a possibly permanent addition to the main site: related post links. These appear only on individual post pages, between the sharing icons and the comment form at the bottom of the post. Each link includes a still from the video, which darkens when you mouse over it. I’m hoping that this will be less of a distraction than an inducement to browse Moving Poems’ increasingly vast archives. The plugin I’m using (a new module for Jetpack, the Swiss army knife of WordPress plugins) seems to key in on videos for the same poet’s work, and to some extent by the same filmmaker. Beyond that it seems to use categories and the posts’ text to determine relatedness. Anyway, I’d appreciate feedback from regular users of the site: great addition or pointless distraction?
Happy Fifth Birthday to Moving Poems!
Five years ago today, I posted the first video to Moving Poems — a clay-on-glass animation by Lynn Tomlinson of Emily Dickinson’s “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” — and the site was born. The brash site description, “The best poetry videos on the web,” was meant largely as a joke on self-serious websites obsessed with search-engine optimization. As best as I can recall, I anticipated spending a month or two posting all the cool poetry videos I was aware of, and letting it go at that. I really just wanted to get them all in one place, largely for my own convenience. Ha!
So here we are. I don’t have the stomach for a long, boastful list of accomplishments, because I am painfully aware of all the things I’ve done wrong or could be doing better. I will say that to the extent that this site has helped expand filmmakers’ and poets’ horizons and led them to create new multimedia works, to network more effectively, and even to create new videopoetry/filmpoetry/cinepoetry-related events that might not have happened otherwise, I am enormously gratified. I continue to be astonished by the breadth and quality of poetry videos that all you filmmakers, video artists, film students and remix geniuses are uploading to the web every day. Since the main site consists entirely of embedded media, it is literally the case, and not the usual bollocks you hear in these kinds of statements, that I couldn’t have done any of this without you. So thanks for sharing your work with the world, and please keep it coming.
Will “House of Cards” save poetry videos on the web?
The lion’s share of online poetry videos (in English, at any rate) are uploaded in the U.S. and, if Moving Poems’ site stats are any indication, their largest audience is also in the U.S. That’s to be expected, I suppose. But there’s a big problem: our internet infrastructure is terrible, among the worst in the developed world. It’s slow, it’s hideously expensive, and a significant portion of the rural population is still on dial-up. I personally have a slow DSL connection via Verizon, one of a handful of enormous, nearly monopolistic providers. Verizon, however, seems to have given up earlier plans to build out its fiber optic network in favor of concentrating on its mobile network, which needless to say is not a viable option for the regular consumption of video for anyone who isn’t pulling a six-figure salary. And the two biggest cable providers, Comcast and Time Warner, recently announced plans for a merger, further reducing competition and thus any fucking incentive whatsoever to improve U.S. internet service.
Against this background came last month’s decision by a federal appeals court to strike down parts of the Federal Communications Commission’s admittedly Byzantine “net neutrality” rules cobbled together in 2010. This means that ISPs could start throttling the bandwidth from any website they choose, for any reason — and what uses more bandwidth than streaming video? It doesn’t help if an ISP is also a significant content provider such as Time Warner and doesn’t fancy the competition. YouTube’s owner Google could easily afford to reach agreements with ISPs. But could Vimeo, and the welter of smaller video hosting companies? What about start-ups bringing us the Next Big Thing in online video?
And sure enough: within weeks, charges were flying that Verizon was deliberately slowing down Netflix. With the second season of the über-popular American version of House of Cards, a web-only Netflix original, released this month, the politicians in D.C. might actually be paying attention, because the show is all about corrupt congressmen — and as we all know, politicians are a supremely self-regarding lot. Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the Gilded Age, said in an excellent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air that many if not most congressional representatives will admit in private that net neutrality is important, but may be afraid to say so publicly because of the power of the telecom industry. So let’s hope they and their aides are big House of Cards fans… and that their constituents keep up the pressure.
But the main action on net neutrality rules shifted from stop-gap measures in Congress back to the Federal Communications Commission this week, as FCC chair Tom Wheeler issued a statement recommending that the commission write new rules that the courts might find acceptable. Predictably, a telecom industry tool in the House of Representatives immediately proposed legislation that would block the FCC from doing this.
Comcast, meanwhile, announced that it had reached some sort of agreement with Netflix, as tens of thousands of people registered their discontent with the proposed Comcast-Time Warner merger via online petition sites, emails to the FCC, etc. Comcast are desperate to portray themselves as reasonable players — and Netflix is surely eager to hedge their bets in case net neutrality isn’t restored. Or as GigaOm writer Stacey Higginbotham put it:
There are two ways of interpreting this news. The first is that Netflix, worried about the threat of the FCC dismantling network neutrality and allowing ISPs to start charging content providers for delivering their traffic, decided to make a deal early when it could get lower prices. The second is the opposite; that Comcast, trying to appear benevolent as it seeks to create the largest broadband provider in the country via a merger with Time Warner Cable, peered with Netflix to avoid regulators asking tough questions.
Let’s take the optimistic scenario and assume that the FCC approves new net neutrality rules, the courts uphold them, and Congress doesn’t fuck with them. We’re still left with craptastic internet in the country that invented it. According to Susan Crawford, it may be years before that will change, and it will probably happen city by city and region by region in a piecemeal fashion. But at least net neutrality would provide a level playing field for new innovators — and allow me to continue surfing Vimeo and YouTube for new poetry videos on my 1.5 mps “broadband” connection from Verizon.
“The collaborative process is enriching for everyone involved”: an interview with Marc Neys
This is the fifth in a series of interviews with poets and remixers who have provided or worked with material from The Poetry Storehouse, a website which collects “great contemporary poems for creative remix.” This interview with filmmaker Marc Neys (A.K.A. Swoon) shares a remixer’s perspective.
1. Would you briefly describe the remix work you have done based on poems from The Poetry Storehouse?
MN: If I recall correctly, both “Telegram” and “Today is your advocate” were your typical “Swoon approach”: first creating a track, getting ideas for images—”Hey, that one might fit perfectly!”— while doing so. If the track is good and the basic idea and feel of the chosen footage (originally intended for other projects in both cases) fits, they create themselves, really. I follow my gut and the flow of the poem/reading/sound to put the images right.
“Sweet Tea” was another story. I made a video (making use of an old experiment from way back) first, but it didn’t do the job. The track was right on from the beginning, but the video? It took a completely different approach—working and experimenting with photos—to make something I thought worked well.
2. How is The Poetry Storehouse different from or similar to other resources you have used for your remix work?
MN: It’s the same in the sense that there are poems (some of them I like, others not to my taste) and there are often fine readings. But it’s much easier in the sense that I don’t have to go through the whole process of finding and getting in contact with the original creators. Though sometimes I do miss that contact. Often a similar contact forms after the video is released, so that’s a good thing.
It’s a fine place to go to once in a while to check what’s new and see if anything “clicks.” I remember doing the same with the Qarrtsiluni issues…but there I had to ask the poet if it was OK to use their work for a video.
3. What specific elements do you look for when you browse offerings at The Storehouse (or, what is your advice to poets submitting to The Storehouse)?
MN: I’m very much a browser. Are there titles that jump out, certain lines that hit me? If that’s the case, I go looking and listening for a reading. I like my poetry audible, so I suggest much more “good” readings, recordings and voices! I know that not every poet is a reader, but getting their poems read out by someone else with a good voice, someone with a great (or even new) interpretation…and if they like their own reading, record them and send that together with the texts.
To me, that’s the whole idea: poetry is great, but should not exist solely in the form of words on paper. It might expand their view of their own work if poets and writers would read their works out loud more often, or get others to read and record their words.
4. Talk about how the remixing process comes together for you. For example, does your inspiration start with a poem, or with specific footage for which you then seek a poem?
MN: Both. Sometimes it’s a word, a phrase, a whole poem that makes me create a soundscape that then leads me to imagery, sometimes I have a track and images that “need” a poem…anything goes. I go with the inspiration of the moment. Take my pot of coffee, open up the computer and see where what leads me. That said, I put a lot of time into my soundscapes, and I believe they are the mortar between the bricks of words and images.
5. Is there anything about the Storehouse process or approach that you feel might with benefit be done differently?
MN: Not that I can think of right now. Well, maybe invite more “voices”—actors, poetry lovers, people with recording equipment who want to give it a try, radio people with a love for poetry—to record the poems and /or get the poets to do so themselves also…
6. Is there anything else you would like to say about your Poetry Storehouse experience (or anything else)?
MN: I still think it’s a great idea, and realized in a good-looking and easy-to-use site. Let it grow. Hopefully, more and more creative people will find their way to the Storehouse, and not only poets with their poems (though, without them, of course, no Storehouse :-)). Being not the greatest writer myself, I love the fact that we can create new things with these existing poems. It opens up the way I look at words, and perhaps makes the writers look differently at images and at their own writing. And in the end, the collaborative process of creating these videopoems, with and on top of creations by others, is enriching for everyone involved.
“Shot Through the Heart”: a poetry film competition from Southbank Centre
London’s Southbank Centre is holding a love-themed poetry film competition with Alastair Cook, Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel and Malgorzata Kitowski as judges.
Shot Through the Heart – Southbank Centre Poetry Film Competition
Friday 14 February – Friday 30 May
Calling all poets and filmmakers! Love is in the air at Southbank Centre and we want you to create poetry films that explore the joy of first love, the pain of lost love, the confusion of displaced love, the purity of platonic love, or any other kind of love.
There are two categories to enter:
Poetry films on the theme of love made for adults
Poetry films on the theme of love made for children (under 12)
Throughout the summer, Southbank Centre’s celebrates the Festival of Love. Our biennial Poetry International festival (17 – 24 July 2014) explores many different themes including the various ways in which love can impact on writers’ lives. Poetry film will be a major part of this year’s Poetry International.
A poetry film can be many different things, as Alastair Cook, Filmmaker and Director of Filmpoem Festival in Dunbar, explains –
‘A poetry film is… a single entwined entity, a melting, a cleaving together of words, sound and vision. It is an attempt to take a poem and present it through a medium that will create a new artwork, separate from the original poem.’
Dates:
Shot Through the Heart Competition opens: Friday 14 February 2014 at 12noon
Shot Through the Heart Competition closes: Friday 30 May 2014 at 6pm
Prizes:
Southbank Centre is very keen that each submission is seen as a collaborative artwork between poet and filmmaker, so this prize is awarded jointly to the winning poet and filmmaker in each category. Poems must be by living poets and follow the copyright guidance and rules here.
Poetry films made for adults:
• Shortlisted films will be shown in Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, on Friday 18 July 2014 and all shortlisted filmmakers will be invited to the screening. The winner and a runner-up will be announced on the night.
• The winning film will receive £500 to be shared between poet and filmmaker as well as a pair of tickets each to Poetry International’s Gala Reading.
• The runner-up poet and filmmaker will receive a pair of tickets each to Poetry International’s Gala Reading.
Poetry films made for children:
• Shortlisted films will be shown in The Clore Ballroom at Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre on Saturday 19 July 2014. The winner and runner-up will be announced on the night.
• The winning children’s film will receive £500 to be shared between poet and filmmaker as well as a pair of tickets each to Poetry International’s Gala Reading.
• The winning film will also be shown in Imagine Children’s Festival 2015 headlining a children’s poetry film event – this is one of our busiest festivals, attracting thousands of audience members every year.
• Both winning films will be shown at 2014’s ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.
New, two-week course on film poetry from Literature Wales
Llenyddiaeth Cymru/Literature Wales is offering a course called The Language of Film Poetry. Let me just paste in their description of the course and instructors (none of whom I was familiar with):
Course 20: The Language of Film Poetry
31 March – 13 April
Tutors: Zillah Bowes, Asher Tlalim and Jane Corbett
Guest: Chris Pow
Fee: £1,750 per personParticipants will be selected. Please download the course document for full details on how to apply.
Whatever your background in documentary film-making, this practical course will help you develop your creativity and find fresh ideas in your work. During the course, you’ll make a short film poetry exercise in response to a written poem of your choice. In a series of workshops, we’ll focus on how to think about sound and image in a juxtaposed way. In the first week, tutorials will focus on developing your idea and shooting your short film, and during the second week, on editing it.
Zillah Bowes is an award winning film-maker and poet. Her films as a cinematographer include Enemies of Happiness, and She, A Chinese. Her debut as a director, Small Protests, was nominated for a Grierson Award, screened internationally and won, among others, the Current Short Cuts award. Zillah trained at the National Film and Television School, where she currently teaches. www.zillahbowes.com
Asher Tlalim has run workshops on Film Poetry at the Sam Spiegel Jerusalem Film School and the National Film and Television School in the UK. An Israeli Film Academy Award winner based in London, he’s been the screenwriter, editor and director of many of his films. His films have been shown at the Berlinale, Montreal, Hamptons, Hollywood and many other film festivals.
Jane Corbett is a screenwriter and novelist, who’s written award-winning screenplays for film and TV over the past twenty years. For many years she ran her own successful film-making course in central London and currently teaches at the National Film and Television School.
www.janecorbett-writer.comChris Pow is a senior tutor in sound design and mixing at the National Film and Television School. He teaches all aspects of sound design for documentary, fiction and animation. Before joining the NFTS he was a dubbing mixer and director of facilities company Universal Sound.
There’s more information in the linked PDF. The introductory paragraphs suggest that the focus of the course is more on making documentary poetry films than on filmpoetry, videopoetry, cinepoetry, etc., but that’s not entirely clear:
This is a practical course to introduce and explore the language of film poetry in documentary filmmaking. Whatever your background in documentary filmmaking, this course will help you develop your creativity and find fresh ideas in your work.
During the course, you will make a short film poetry exercise in response to a written poem of your choice. As it is the centenary of Dylan Thomas, you are also welcome to respond one of his poems.
During the first week we will explore the concept of film poetry and its parallels with written poetry. We will look at the differences between film prose and film poetry. In a series of workshops, we will focus on how to think about sound and image in a juxtaposed way. We will look at how to create expressive images and explore the use of non-synchronous sound and music.
Regardless of which sort of poetry film will be taught, it’s exciting to see such a course being offered, and the venue looks gorgeous. Visit the webpage to download an application.
“It was good to know I’d have no control”: an interview with Amy MacLennan
This is the fourth in a series of interviews with poets and remixers who have provided or worked with material from The Poetry Storehouse — a website which collects “great contemporary poems for creative remix.” Anyone who submits to the Storehouse has to think through the question of creative control — how important is it to you, what do you gain or lose by holding on to or releasing control? Our fourth interview is with Amy MacLennan.
1. Submitting to The Poetry Storehouse means taking a step back from a focus on oneself as individual creator and opening up one’s work to a new set of creative possibilities. Talk about your relationship to your work and how you view this sort of control relinquishment.
AM: This has been very scary and unexpected and wonderful for me. I’ve had a half dozen poems paired with a graphic. I’ve had a few poems recorded with another person reading. This is the first time I’ve been part of a true collaborative project. While it was really scary, it was good to know I’d have no control — EVERYTHING out of my hands. Whatever it became, I wouldn’t have to edit edit edit like my other projects.
2. There is never any telling whether one will love or hate the remixes that result when a poet permits remixing of his or her work by others. Please describe the remixes that have resulted for your work at the Storehouse and your own reactions to them.
AM: It. Was. Weird. I never expected to hear that kind of music, see that kind of video, hear that kind of voice merged into something that I had provided words for. The pacing was crazy interesting for me. I saw other things in my own poem that I wouldn’t have thought before because I was too attached to the rhythms of “Telegram.” I watch this now and think, “Wow. My words were the beginning to THIS? Oh my goodness!”
3. Would you do this again? What is your advice to other poets who might be considering submitting to The Poetry Storehouse?
AM: I would definitely do this again. It expanded my creative brain. I think other poets would adore being involved in this kind of thing with others accepting a piece and taking it to a resolution completely beyond you.
4. Is there anything about the Storehouse process or approach that you feel might with benefit be done differently?
AM: Nope.
5. Is there anything else you would like to say about your Poetry Storehouse experience?
AM: This has made me a different writer. I’m excited to try and find other collaborative partners.
Videopoet Martha McCollough featured in Swoon’s View
American video artist Martha McCollough has been making terrific animated poems, supplying her own texts, for a couple of years now, and I’m always happy to include her work in Moving Poems. Her descriptions are usually pretty minimal, though, and she doesn’t have a website, so I didn’t know much about her or her thinking behind the films. So I was very pleased to see her work featured at Awkword Paper Cut in Marc Neys’ first “Swoon’s View” column of 2014. She says, for example, about one videopoem:
I work as a graphic designer, and one of my jobs was to create a seating chart for the “Business Continuity Room”, which I’m told is an actual underground bunker to which key employees are expected to retreat during catastrophes so that they can continue work without being inconvenienced by interruptions (such as, I don’t know, hurricanes? nuclear war? The total collapse of civilization?) “It Turns Out” considers the fate of the “not quite key” employee under such circumstances.
Filmpoem news: 2014 Festival in Antwerp (call out); feature in The Third Form; Hidden Door
The Filmpoem Festival, which debuted last August in Dunbar, Scotland, will be moving to Antwerp this year in partnership with the Felix Poetry Festival. The organizer, filmmaker and artist Alastair Cook, has just posted a call for submissions [PDF]. The deadline is May 1st, and the festival will be held on Saturday, June 14th in the FelixPakhuis in Antwerp.
In other Filmpoem-related news, Erica Goss’ “Third Form” column on videopoetry this month takes an in-depth look at Alastair’s work, including some of his best films and quotes from a telephone interview. Check it out.
And finally, as it says on the Filmpoem website, “Filmpoem has been invited to close the upcoming Hidden Door festival on 5th April 2014″ in Edinburgh. Alastair made the following show reel for the event, using a text from the Scottish poet Morgan Downie:
http://vimeo.com/84677290
Do join the Filmpoem group if you’re on Facebook.
Letting our children go: an interview with Eric Blanchard
This is the third in a series of interviews with poets and remixers who have provided or worked with material from The Poetry Storehouse — a website which collects “great contemporary poems for creative remix.” Anyone who submits to the Storehouse has to think through the question of creative control — how important is it to you, what do you gain or lose by holding on to or releasing control? Our third interview is with Eric Blanchard.
1. Submitting to The Poetry Storehouse means taking a step back from a focus on oneself as individual creator and opening up one’s work to a new set of creative possibilities. Talk about your relationship to your work and how you view this sort of control relinquishment.
EB: There was a time where I considered my poems to be my children. Thus, I was very protective of them. Maybe I still feel that way, a little. Even so, there comes a time when one’s children must be released into the world to make their own impact, great or small. Our children develop lives of their own. We have little say as to what their impact might be, other than the foundation onto which they are born. Why should a poem have only one chance at making an artistic impression?
On the other hand, being the impetus, or even just basic source material, for other artists’ work in various forms is strangely satisfying… maybe it’s somewhat like being an organ donor. I have yet to regret it.
2. There is never any telling whether one will love or hate the remixes that result when a poet permits remixing of his or her work by others. Please describe the remixes that have resulted for your work at the Storehouse and your own reactions to them.
EB: Being a bit of a control freak, especially as it pertains to my artist image, it can be hard to let go. Perhaps it is fortunate none of my poems have been dissected and/or rearranged yet. Still, I have had to accept that possibility.
So far, the provocative reading by Nic S., the soundscape by Swoon, and the videos founded on my poem “Sweet Tea” have all been both interesting and rewarding, if not representative of the original intent and flavor of the poem.
3. Would you do this again? What is your advice to other poets who might be considering submitting to The Poetry Storehouse?
EB: Yes, I would.
My advice to other poets would be to accept that you are part of an artistic community and that if your work inspires, gives an artistic spark to, or provides raw material for another artist’s work, then it is doing its job. Besides, anyone who ever stumbles across your poems, wherever they might be published, might be borrowing from them, remixing them, or setting them to music in the privacy of their own abode. At The Poetry Storehouse it is simply done in an open forum. And your poem continues to live on the forum in its original form, notwithstanding what other artistic forms might be attached to it.
4. Is there anything about the Storehouse process or approach that you feel might with benefit be done differently?
EB: I really don’t know. I am just a simple poet. I do wish I had other talents that I could use to be a more active part of the Storehouse … so, if you could change that little thing, it would be great. Thanks.
5. Is there anything else you would like to say about your Poetry Storehouse experience?
EB: To be honest, my initial motivation for submitting my previously published poems to The Poetry Storehouse was to get them republished online. The audience for print publications is relatively small, and the chance of anyone reading work published in them, after the initial distribution, is pretty slim. The Storehouse provides the opportunity for print only poems to have new life and reach a greater, on-going audience whether or not the poem get chosen for remix or video presentation. Of course, the window of possibility remains open as long as the work stays on the internet.
Thanks again to Nic and all the other collaborators who make The Poetry Storehouse such an interesting and exciting artistic forum.
