A couple of weeks ago I had the fun experience of reading a few of my poems in a studio. My friends Hilda (fellow poet) and Wayne (the director, cameraman, et al) invited me to give it a go. They’ve been filming poets around Los Angeles for the last year and have a website where they post them. They credit me with being the catalyst for the venture. At a feature reading of our Night Birds poetry group at Coffee Cartel a while back I asked Wayne to take some pictures with my digital camera and it planted the seed in him to get a video camera and the whole thing blossomed from there. 

Michael, another of the Night Bird poets (this is what the six of us who workshop with Sarah Maclay call ourselves), volunteered his loft/studio space at The Brewery in east L.A. and filled in as the "sound man" on the taping. It took a couple of hours and the whole thing was really fun and interesting: getting the lights, the background, timing, camera angle, sound, all just right. So far there are three studio tapings: Michael’s, mine and a poet named Annette Sugden (not a Night Bird). You can take a look at them (and more) at Poetry.LA. Just click on the picture and it will take you to YouTube.

Of course, looking at the video, I can see where I could have done so many things better: smiling more, for one, and doing more voice modulation in tone and energy. Oh, well, it’s a learning experience and it could definitely have been worse. I took a couple of pictures of us at Michael’s after the shoot. We were breaking everything down and getting ready to go before I remembered, so the pics are staged after the fact.

Hilda, Wayne & me 

Pretending to be filmed–but it looks good! 

Michael outside of his loft at The Brewery.