Just before Christmas we held the inaugural meeting of Poet in the City’s new Audio-Visual group. This has come together more or less spontaneously and already includes several individuals who have experience of radio and film work.
The British Library Sound Archive already record most Poet in the City events and this is gradually building into a fabulous collection of poetry reading and performance, available for anyone to listen to as part of the Library’s resources. I did so myself just recently, spending a couple of fascinating days in my own personal listening room, with headphones on my head!
The Audio-Visual group, chaired by Melanie Roberts, is not intended to replace this invaluable service but to develop the recorded aspect of the charity’s work by capturing interesting magazine-style items, interviews, snatches of poetry and feedback arising from the charity’s many activities.
Thanks to the involvement of the distinguished film-maker Colin Still we also hope that Poet in the City will shortly be creating video podcasts to enrich and enliven the website with clips of poets reading and of live events. With talented individuals like this involved I think that, in the long run, the sky is the limit!
Hopefully audio files created by the group will shortly be providing mesmerising extracts of poetry and comment on the Poet in the City website, tempting new audiences to enjoy poetry, and building on the great success of the live events. Soon visitors to the website will be able to listen to recordings of poet’s reading their own work, discuss poetry with acclaimed poets in the forum discussion rooms, and buy poetry books from the online bookshop.
When this all starts happening, hopefully during the course of 2008, Poet in the City will really start to feel like an online community.
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