Wednesday, September 1, 2010

The Early Beginnings Of My Recording Poets on Video

A long time ago a group of poets sat around a table trying to figure out how to promote poetry and poets. This discussion has been going on since the first poet stood up and the guy in cave #3 is really rattling my nerves.

I need to point out this discussion took place before the full blown Internet we have today. Public radio had little to no poetry, not even the local or NPR stations. Poetry was being dropped out of magazines and television, forget about it.

Well time flowed on. I remembered that conversation from time to to time until one day it hit me that I could do something about it.

By that time I lost track of the community of poets that I hung out with. I had the means but no poet contacts. Years later I saw a notice in a local newspaper about poets reading on the Los Angeles Metro Red, Blue and Gold Lines.

This is an example of one of the videos. The original video was uploaded 320x240. Due to new to the new player upscaling it is being displayed as 480x390.



This is another one with Catherine Daly reading a poem by E.E. Cummings:



And that is how I started to record videos of poets. It can be moving. It can be an audio nightmare if you are recording on a moving train.

I had a crappy camcorder I needed to find a way to work around the limitations to find the sweat spot.

Lighting problems required me to roll with the punches. In Catherine's video I can see a lighted sign in the station. I could have asked her to move over near the sign to get an extra hit of light.

I didn't think of it at the time. Now I know, be aware of environmental light sources.

That is the thing. Get out, try and do the best you can. Learn from it and try again.

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