Sunday, April 5, 2009

What is Multi Media Poetry?

They are sometimes known as video poems, and their names are self-explanatory; poems that are put into videos. They usually include music and a sequence of pictures or videos in the background while the text is spoken or just written in the foreground.
Multimedia Poetry is a genre that is evolving into an art form.

"Our extension of poetry into video seems only to ratify a deeper understanding, as poets and performers, that poetry rests in a continuous spectrum of expanded genres, each genre an amalgam, offering aesthetic expressions that conjoin text with some other creation. Poetry music. Poetry performance. Poetry theatre. Poetry film and video. Whole literatures in the cybernetic realm where the computer enacts by proxy the author's will upon the text. The breakdown of psychological barriers from literature on the page to literature on the stage was the public's prelude to realizing broader rewards in media poetry of all forms. Poetry video is the public's first step beyond. Even in its most essential form, it demolishes the old assumption that page and poem are one. We now know poetry is where you find it, in the expressions the world offers. We construct, save, and transmit these experiences for the future. Images and sounds now operate as words where we had no previous literature because the symbols of our poetry were confined to paper in the reader's hands. So we have not the end of a literacy, but the construction of a new one: visible, audible, temporal, conscious, tactile, bonding author and reader by their gaze."

- Kurt Heintz, Director of Chicago's Guild Complex Poetry Film festival and founder of the e-poet's network.

I watched many examples of MMP that were saved on the school storage. I didn't like most of them, they had very random pictures and music. The poems did not make any sense, I know that the students who wrote them could have done much better than that.
Also, the quality of the videos were very bad, which is not their fault, as they used an older version of Movie Maker, which produces low res videos.
I searched in the internet for videos of MMP, and I did not find any examples of MMP on Youtube besides the ones that were uploaded from our school last year, the same ones as on Student Storage.