Last night I rented The Tracey Fragments (2007), a film by Canadian director Bruce McDonald (of Hard Core Logo fame).

The film follows Tracey Berkowitz through two or three days of her troubled teenage life. McDonald offers the viewer touching and troubling insight into Tracey’s reality, crafting the story by overlaying screen atop one another to give the film a mosaic quality (like the photo I included here). The effect is beautiful and, at times, rightly overwhelming.
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Today at 3:00, the CKXU program “Not Your Mother’s Poetry” will feature an hour-long show on my poetry and person. Moreover, I selected the songs for the program, so the tunes will kick and hopefully establish my “indie cred”!

You can tune into the show by listening to the streaming audio here. Once I have a copy of the program, I’ll post it here.

UPDATE: This week’s show is part 1 of 2. The second hour will air next Saturday.

In an effort to have quality poetry inbreak on the daily consciousness of those who would welcome it, I have finally followed through on delivering poems to people via SMS, using twitter. If you want short poems delivered to your mobile phone, please subscribe here.

Twitter is a free service and most mobile phone companies do not charge you to receive text messages. I might not need to shout “FREE POEMS!” but I might as well. Also, if you start twittering poems, please let me know, so I can follow you.

Using SMS text messages to convey poetry, or poetic lines, has inherent constraints (140 characters, no line breaks, ect.). Particularly because I love the long poem, I am not suggesting that SMS poems will replace poetry. Instead, this form offers people a chance to have tiny pieces of art engage them unexpectedly in their day. Like all art, sometime my poems will be read, sometimes not; sometimes they will resonate, sometimes they won’t. Regardless, they exists as potential and possibility.

Since twitter is more than 5 minutes old, I know I am not the first person to imagine this application of the technology. However, I have yet to find any community formed around the idea of poets sharing lines of their work with one another. For myself, I would welcome having a few high quality writers inviting me to pause from the daily routine by sending beautiful words to my phone.

I respect some of the reservations that some people, like Robert Peake, have about technology and poetry. However, I am not looking to replace poetry with Poetry 2.0. Said again, this experiment is simply an augmentation of poetry and an invitation to pause. The power of SMS poems does not lie in the fact that they become instant or commodified, but rather that people encounter poems within their pattern of their day. This idea is not much different from putting poetry on buses or beautiful graffiti art on someone’s walk to work. The difference SMS poems offer is choice to read or not read.

So, here are my self-imposed guidelines for using twitter for poetry:

• Each SMS poem will be treated as a self contained unit. Preceding poems are not required for context.
• I will offer myself up in language. I will strive for beautiful words and for reflective utterances, not simply inconsistent ephemera
• I will offer an sms poem about once a day
• I may include lines from larger works in sms poems. I may also incorporate sms lines in larger works.

Look forward to my lines. I look forward to yours.
L

I found this political video, which supports Obama, to successfully show that political leadership can inspire and rally a tired and cynical generation. Moreover, I was impressed at how the sampling of Barack’s speech from New Hampshire turned into such inspiring a song. I found the creation compelling and, to a large degree, authentic and honest. Although a significant amount of professional insight went into crafting this video and song, I see genuine hope in most of the singers. This is simply a political marketing tool. This creation shows real people working to support their beliefs and hopes. The work is powerful.
My only reservation about this video is that Scarlett Johansson, who is working to embark on a singing career, is featured heavily because of her celebrity and not her vocal talent.

Also, for those of you who haven’t caught it, “Yes, we can” is a slogan that has been popular and potent since the 1960s. Have a careful listen to The Beatles All You Need is Love for the citation.

an image i liked (from here)