It isn't that I actually need another project - I always have lots on the go - too much probably. But late last year I got interested in making little films. I guess I'd kind of been interested in it for a while, but I was spurred particularly by two things. The first was the poems I've been writing that are inspired by films and film-making, and the second was reading a biography of Kubrick (the frustrating one that ends before he's died, because he hadn't died yet when it was published).I started wondering what it would be like to look at things through a viewfinder, to frame the world in a narrower way. I started to think about the parallels between metaphor in poetry and the metaphor in film.
Then I started thinking about how it would be cool to video poets reading their poems as a kind of resource and as an archive for the future. A few years ago Jan Kemp and Jack Ross organised the mammoth Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive project - basically all the poets in New Zealand were recorded for this. I don't plan to embark on something so big, but I'd like to video poets around about the place reading some of their work, and perhaps do some interviews with them too.
I'm also interested in what I (and some other people) call video poems, which are kind of like music videos for poems. My first video, 'Calling you home', which I blogged about recently, is one of those.
I'll make these available on the net, and I thought it would be cool to pull together what else is out there that other people have done. So, to this end, I've set up a YouTube group for videos of NZ poets and/or poems: http://www.youtube.com/group/NZPoetsonvideo - please join and contribute if you're doing this sort of thing.
I've also started a directory of NZ poets on video on the net: http://nzpoetsonvideo.wordpress.com/. This is very much in progress - in fact not really started, but I think it will be a good resource. I've found a few more relevant videos on YouTube, and some on the NZ Electronic Poetry Centre website that I haven't added yet, but if you know of any, or you've made some, either add them to the YouTube group or email the links to nzpoetsonvideoATyahoo.co.nz.
