One
Poem A Day Won't Kill You project started showing on McMinnville Community Media Monday April
1st. I have begun to post the readings
on our Youtube channel today. We started
asking folks about their favorite poems and filming in May 2012. Most of the readings were completed by
mid-September. By the end of February,
2013 the editing was done. Seeing it in
motion after all these months of putting it together gives me a feeling of
lightness, of youth, of anything is possible.
Those pleasant delusions we give ourselves when we complete a "job
of work" as my dad used to say.
One
Poem A Day Won't Kill You is the idea of poet Phoebe Newman. She explained to Arts Alive host Lynda
Phillippi during a recent appearance on the show that the origins of the phrase
came as a personal exhortation. She had
recently received her Master of Fine Arts degree in writing (primarily poetry)
and she and her husband had moved to Ketchican Alaska. She began to struggle to maintain her
motivation to continue writing regularly.
She began to say to herself, "One Poem A Day Won't Kill You"
as a way to tell herself to write a poem a day.
In
the mid-1990s as a way to encourage poetry in KetchiKan she went to the local
public access radio station (cite, call and web) and put out several public
service requests for local folks to sign up to read their favorite poem on the
radio during the month of April, which is National Poetry Month. The response was over whelming. She called her radio show "One Poem A
Day Won't Kill You". She produced
the show for ten years. The show is
still going on in Ketchican. This will
be its 18th year.
We
have been filming poetry readings and last year we filmed Phoebe reading selections from her books of poetry. She asked us if we would like to do video
of Yamhill County folks reading their favorite poems. I had to think about it. The studio approach of bringing people in to
the studio Phoebe used for her radio program.
Bringing people into the MCM studio (cite) to read was very doable. Using the studio has some advantages. It is efficient. People are scheduled in, maybe several in a
day, they are taped reading, little editing and it is done. The TV studio also has some
disadvantages. The studio can be pretty
intimidating with the lights and cameras.
There needs to be a crew for cameras and control room. And most importantly it can be visually
boring and for a visual medium that is not a good thing.
We
decided to film people reading poems where ever they felt comfortable. We filmed in gardens, back yards, kitchens,
living rooms, city streets. Each
location was a challenge for lighting and for audio. I learned a lot about camera settings. Then
it sometimes got complicated in editing.
Overall, the filming the readings in field locations added to the
uniqueness of each reading.
The
other lesson this project has helped me learn about is copyright
permissions. Just finding out whom to
ask to get permission is a lot of work and can be very frustrating. Since I volunteer and consider our video
endeavors as completely non-commercial and educational, I am not always
generous in my thoughts about those who want money to allow us to use the poem
or music in what amounts to free advertising for them. They say things get easier as you do
them. I hope so.
I
will be posting the readings the day after they have been aired on MCM and
thinking about a follow up show reflecting on the making of One Poem A Day
Won't Kill You.
