The Clown Car Memorandum
Room for Clowns in Poetry?
I’m looking forward to some great poetry events in the DC area this weekend. Former Maryland Poet Laureate, Grace Cavalieri will be featured at Rocky Jones’ Evil Grin, Sunday on Zoom. Monday brings us poets Jessica Cuello & Mark Doty at Café Muse, also on Zoom. See Coming Up below for all the information.
The Clown Car Memorandum
Here’s a video reading of a poem recently published in the Hybrid section of the Glint Literary Journal. It’s a hybrid because it is a prose poem that is also uniquely visual. It is one of a couple dozen I’ve written that use little boxes containing the phrases that push the poem along.
Making videos of your work makes them easier to share. Poets usually do not have the sort of resources necessary to make elaborate productions. But a lot can be done with a webcam and a bit of creative graphic help. Here I stretched the metaphor using a Word memo template. I then recorded the poem into a webcam.
In my experiments with video poems, it looks like there’s always the same questions: Do I show the poet-reader? Show the text of the poem? Just record over an abstract background? In this one, I was able to pop up an image of myself reading the poem at the top of the "memo" so that viewers could read and hear the poem without breaking the metaphor. I added music from Google’s license free audio library.
I appreciate feedback on these experiments. Video poems are fairly new but I think they will become more commonplace as the tools to make them become more ubiquitous.
Have a good weekend all…and I’m not joking!
Coming Up
Sunday, February 4, 2024, 3pm-5pm Evil Grin poetry reading via Zoom featuring Grace Cavalieri.
February 5, 2024, Café Muse will host in Zoom, poets Jessica Cuello and Mark Doty. If you are not already a Café Muse subscriber, you can register for the free Zoom link at https://sites.google.com/view/cafe-muse-events/home.
February 7, 2024 to February 10, 2024. AWP Conference, Kansas City, MO.
February 9, 2024, Billy Collins at the Gaithersburg Book Festival at the Asbury Methodist Village Rosborough Cultural Arts Center in Gaithersburg.
February 17, 1pm to 3pm, Poetry Open Mic, New Deal Cafe,
March 1, 2024, Don Illich and Susan Okie will be reading in the Words Out Loud Poetry Series. So far it looks to be a Zoom event, but if it changes I’ll do an update.
April 21, 2024, 11-4. Kensington Day of the Book.
If you’d like me to list an upcoming poetry event in Everyday Poet, please let me know by emailing me at henrycrawfordpoetry@gmail.com