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Digital Poetry Goes Live!

Digital Poetry Goes Live

57 Productions is engaged in an original online programme - exploring the possibilities of poetry's relationship with the new media - including new forms of digital production and distribution – for computers, for pods and other emerging mobile technologies.

The internet is a powerful communications medium and a decentred space for cultural production and exchange. It’s arguably elitist and yet potentially democratic and liberating - and as with previous technological revolutions it requires a re-situating of poetry. Perhaps only here and now it is possible for poetry to position itself at the heart of new and developing systems of dynamic and interactive multi-media cultural production.

In the first instance 57 produces live events – performances, workshops and talks (including media events, for example, for radio and TV) through its agency service. Promoting the power and potential of ‘live literature’ - from the out-set we envisaged creating a recording environment for writers and performers – and so began to produce cassettes, CDs and videos – soon creating a popular and unique catalogue of over 30 titles.

We launched our first website – www.57productions.com - in 2000, initially as a fairly static html data-base, carrying textual and visual-imagery (jpegs) and set up primarily for its marketing value. However, aware of the multi-media possibilities, in 2003 we designed and launched the Poetry Jukebox – www.poetryjuebox.com – a free resource of streaming audio-files (MP3s) featuring over 40 poets – as well as a secure online ordering facility for our audio titles.

The Poetry Jukebox remains a popular production and continues to grow. While ostensibly adult orientated and created, in the first instance, for fun - the jukebox has enjoyed a warm reception in class-rooms and in language and literature seminars. It has been projected onto giant plasma screens in libraries (for example in Liverpool Central Library for National Poetry Day) and on to interactive white-boards in schools.

While live literary and performance platforms will always be important to our programme (in 2007 we undertake perhaps the largest touring programme we ever have), we realise that the new public platform is the internet – and so we’ve recently announced exciting developments in our online programme – re-launching the 57 website designed as a dynamic electronic catalogue, carrying new audio-visual, audio and interactive content – hosting ‘iPoems’ - www.ipoems.org.uk - and the worlds’ first ‘Poetry Video-Jukebox’ - www.poetryvideojukebox.com. The new site has received great press globally and on the day of launch alone received over 120,000 hits.

iPoems presents a wealth of new recordings alongside 57s original and popular back-catalogue – starting with about 1001 MP3s - and the poetry video-jukebox features over 20 newly produced and special archive poetry-films.

57 has also announced new content for the Poetry Jukebox, newly commissioned articles – further developing the websites’ value as an educational resource (in the first instance for A Level and Higher) - and developed the electronic-art content of the site, featuring in particular ‘flash-poems’, a special collaboration with the poet and animator Peter Howard.

Anyone can use the iPoems and Jukebox systems. Access is provided through either subscription-based registration for the streaming service and/or by a direct down-load facility.

The first artists featured on iPoems, the poetry jukebox and the video-jukebox include:

John Hegley, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Kamau Brathwaite, Tony Harrison, Ian McMillan, Tom Leonard, Jane Draycott, Benjamin Zephaniah, John Cooper Clarke, Michael Donaghy, Sarah Maguire, Liz Lochhead, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Kwame Dawes, Roger McGough, Choman Hardi, Peter Finch, Brian Patten, Zena Edwards, Neil Rollinson, Adrian Mitchell, Rita Ann Higgins, Levi Tafari, Jackie Kay, Michael Rosen, Imtiaz Dharker, Jayne Cortez, Christopher Logue, Moniza Alvi, Matthew Sweeney, Francesca Beard, Salena ‘Saliva’ Godden, Dorothea Smartt, Courttia Newland, Mark Gwynne Jones, Nick Toczek, Aidan Andrew Dun, Attila the Stockbroker, Joolz Denby, Mahmood Jamal, Patience Agbabi, Lemn Sissay, Mimi Khalvati, Pascale Petit, Debjani Chatterjee … with many more to be announced.

It is a list of which we are very proud. Indeed we believe this production represents one of the most exciting and innovative publishing ventures the world of poetry has seen for sometime.

The iPoems system has infinite capacity and new content is in production continuously. For instance, we’ve just announced new recordings from Matthew Sweeney, Neil Rollinson and Sarah Maguire – poets from the Cape/Random House and Chatto imprints – publishers we’re proud to have as our partners in this project – along with, for example, Bloodaxe Books, Pan MacMillan and LKJ Records – with whom we have a license to feature 14 of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s finest spoken-word performances.

It is a heady mix and widely representative, with the strong presence of women, black British poetry in all its own diversity, and the hale younger male choir of our leading publishing houses.

This programme celebrates the power and pleasure of poetry as a spoken, oral or aural art form – reminding us that its medium is sound and vision as much as pen and paper – at the same time as exploring the whole of gamut of form and style – offering sonnets, sestinas, ballads, lyrics, dubs, rants, prose-poems and the all the various special effects of rhythm and rhyme. Some poems draw on musical influences implicitly within their structure or explicitly by introducing instrumental accompaniment and sound-scapes.

Already the systems feature over 50 hours of content and users can listen to works exclusively available to 57 – including generous selections of works by many of the key contemporary poets writing in English today, in all it’s wonderful variety. For example, iPoems presents over 50 poems from each of Adrian Mitchell, John Hegley and Michael Rosen, and over 30 poems from each of Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Jackie Kay and Liz Lochhead.

On launch the system also premiered new recordings by Peter Finch, Tom Leonard, Kwame Dawes and Kamau Brathwaite (who offers a brand-new series of audio-works entitled ‘Praise Poems’) plus rare recordings with the great, late Michael Donaghy - one of the few recording sessions Michael did.

57 offers one months’ free trial membership for streaming access to all areas, after which annual subscriptions are £15 – and any user has the option of downloading content to their computer, player or mobile at 50p per audio-item (MP3s) and £1.50 per audio-visual file (MPEGs). As mobile technologies develop the iPoems system keeps pace - this is poetry on the move.

We can imagine both the general user and students browsing these works and compiling their own audio-anthologies of poetry on to their computer, pod or mobile – whether for pure pleasure or as part of their studies.

The Poetry Video-Jukebox system launched with over 20 poetry films - including newly produced works featuring Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Jane Draycott, Peter Finch, Ian McMillan and Tom Leonard - all shot on location with the authors, in Brixton, Didcot, Cardiff, Barnsley and Glasgow respectively. The films acknowledge that a poem is often an invocation of place - and bears within it wonderful filmic potentials.
This is the beginning of a production programme to create a unique space for poetry and film – two apparently estranged genres – not dissimilar to poetry’s undervalued relationship with music.

These five new films have been produced by 57 with a team of two photographers - the director Phil Hayes and editor Peter Lewis – two talented young film-makers with growing lists of credits.

Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s ‘The Wife of Bath speaks in Brixton Market’ is a poem representing a special take and cultural spin on Chaucer’s original tale. As an accomplished performer Jean brings all her theatrical skill-set to the party – performing directly to camera as she walks through the bustling stall-lined avenue of the market – providing a lively and colourful incidental backdrop to her lyrical commentary on contemporary and ageless sexual mores.

The film is sexy, funny and challenging – and as Jean explains in a separately filmed interview about the genesis of the poem – it provides for a performance of utmost linguistic virtuosity – as she translates middle-English into Jamaican patois – finding phrases, rhythms and rhymes that resonate though time and across apparently differing cultures – touching upon a common humanity and highlighting timeless sensibilities. It’s both raunchy and political.

Jane Draycott’s poem ‘Single Lens’ is an elegy, recording the loss of a dear relation and friend – and it is also an elegy or memorial of place – a place in time, a family holiday in France, fondly remembered, and Didcott, Oxfordshire, where the poem was filmed.

One of the poem’s emergent themes is the relationship between photography (as practiced by the dear departed) landscape and language. The characteristics of flux and transience seem to define the latter, while the former offers to capture the moment and keep it as testimony.

The poem itself refers to and draws upon photographic and cinematic techniques – and so the film - with widely panning shots, time-lapse, slow-motion and the juxtaposition of images - speaks back to it. The film is in dialogue with the poem. Shot in black and white the film also seems to offer a compliment and contrast to the poem in print or as text – and the result is something entirely new – a film-poem or poem-film.

Peter Finch’s ‘The Way It Grows’ has an altogether different energy. Post-modern in style and attitude, the poem offers a description and critique of waste, conspicuous consumption and the disposable society. Shot on the Cardiff Bay peninsular, the film opens a perspective on how natural and man-made environments merge.

Split-screen, alternating landscape shots and those of the author performing to camera; using cut-up and collage techniques and focusing on wide-samples of found-materials - like couches abandoned on mud-flats and rubble-strewn marsh grass-lands – the film elaborates upon the compositional method of the poem - as the poet explains in the accompanying interview.

The importance and value of sound itself is also foregrounded. Finch’s performance is assured and dramatic. The poems use of assonance, dissonance and alliteration, especially on the sibilants, builds almost to distortion. The poem literally hisses, fizzes and buzzes.

With both panoramic and close-up shots, stills of dead marine-life and dumped domestic items – rapidly alternating and edited in a style approaching animation – the poem rises to a crescendo of aural and visual cues – which while evoking entropy – also invokes a raw and redeeming energy.

Tom Leonard’s ‘Unrelated Incidents’ is a film simpler in conception and execution –and approaches character-study in its focus on talking-head, torso and profile shots of the author reading the poem in the setting of his own study, framed by bookshelves and CD racks and a tall-window – offering a backdrop of Kelvin Park’s tree-tops.

The poem is a loose sequence including the famous ‘this is the 6 o’clock news’ section known by GCSE students studying the poems ‘From Other Cultures’ in the national curriculum for language and literature. It is an irony never lost on but fully exposed by the poet as he takes us through different scenarios – some set up as simple sketches, others as takes on philosophic or linguistic disquisitions.

The satirical strategy works. It is excruciatingly funny and pertinent as it mocks and exposes notions of cultural supremacy or inferiority – riven by race, class, philosophical and religious bias - and offers up a more generous and inclusive appreciation of the ontological power of language.

Ian McMillan’s ‘The er Barnsley Seascapes’ is another sequence and another elegy of sorts, as it commemorates the passing of a way of work and life – the mining industry in South Yorkshire. At the same time it high-lights and celebrates forms of language that slip out of the range of our consciousness even as they speak us – in this case the use of the phrase ‘er’ – denoting the thinking process, buying time or weighing up options, expressing continuity and disruption, the humming of the gears of the imagination.

The poem performs a commentary on the signs of economic and social change for a whole community - and the trauma involved. The film is shot on various locations in Barnsley, including the decaying memorial of Barnsley Main pit-head, artificially created wet-lands, motorway-bridges and landscaped slag-heaps.

It presents a witty and critical vision of the post-industrialisation or post-modernisation process – the change from heavy-industry to service and sad heritage-industry, the make-over and erasure of memory, the re-branding, re-invention and re-imagination of place.

The Video-Jukebox also features rare archive films of poets in performance - including, for example, Benjamin Zephaniah, Tony Harrison and Michael Donaghy - among others. Remarkably the film of Michael delivering his poem ‘Black Ice and Rain’ at Bloomsbury Theatre, appositely at the launch of the poetry-jukebox, is the only footage of Michael in performance that exists. Very special content indeed.

In 2007 we aim to produce new films for the Video-Jukebox, but also for release as DVDs – as we appreciate that people will always value the physical item just as we will always love books.

We also launched the iPoems system with 3 very different and very special flash-poetry animations - especially commissioned by 57. The first featured poems are by Patience Agbabi, Peter Finch and Tom Leonard - and they represent a collaboration with the poet and flash-animator Peter Howard. Very simply ‘flash’ is a computer graphics application that allows for the interaction of text and animation and is commonly used in advertising. It warrants poetry’s attention as the toolkits are strangely similar, even as the products very different – as these items demonstrate.

The sonnet ‘Transformatrix’ by Patience Agbabi, the text plus Patience’s wonderfully performed audio-recording of it is taken up by Peter and itself transformed into something entirely different, a flash-poem. The theme of the poem is form itself and the relationship between form and freedom as expressed through the structure of the sonnet – with it’s iambic beats, rhyme schemes, quatrains and couplets – and the metaphysical question of form as a metaphor for systems of support and/or suppression – hence the kinky, erotic, bondage imagery of the poem – as it feels it’s way through a seemingly contradictory or even conflicting duality – through to a new realisation.

Tom Leonard’s flash-poem - ‘Triptych’ is a monumental work of the utmost simplicity. It is a kinetic concrete poem. Black text on white background. An apparently straightforward dedicatory sentence – ‘for those us who live outside of the narrative’ – which over a period of three distinct panels fractures and re-forms. Tom subtitles the poem as ‘an on going memorial’ – as it loops endlessly. There is no audio. The silence the poem generates is profound.

Peter Finch’s ‘Maginogian Translated’ is also strikingly original – with text and studio-processed sound-recording by the poet – brought into relation with subtle and dynamic animation. The work was produced through email and telephone consultations between the poet and the animator – and we have something powerful enough to stretch the imagination of the Druids.

In each case the poet collaborated closely with the animator and the net results are altogether new poems. We’ll be inviting Peter Howard to engage with 57 poets again in the near future and commissioning further adventures in this exciting hybrid of artistic production.

Streaming access to these flash-poems is provided through registration to the iPoems system or people can simply use our down-load service and take them wherever.

We note that new technology is creating space and opportunity for artistic experimentation, for example, that ‘poetry wall-paper’ or ‘poetry screen-savers’ are now beginning to appear. They relate to and revive that under-valued tradition of the ‘poster-poem’. We believe that there’s a lot more to follow - and as for ‘poetry ring-tones’, with the iPoems system they are already here.

57 has also posted new items on the Articles section of the site – with, for example, Ian McMillan weighing-in with personal observations on a poets’ public life – and a weighing-up of the positions of academic and performance camps from Cornelia Graebner. With new articles to appear shortly from Mervyn Morris on the poet Michael Smith, coinciding with a rare re-release of the recording of his poem ‘Say Natty Natty’ on the Poetry Jukebox - and from Nigel McCloughlin, poet and creative writing tutor at the University of Gloucester, taking us through various approaches to using new media resources – the educational value of the site is set for growth.

While the new 57 Forum offers users a platform to get involved and an opportunity to engage with individuals and/or communities represented – as we begin to explore the possibilities for poetry suggested by the growth of such social networking and user-generated content outlets like myspace and youtube.

Boldly 57 has effectively announced itself as an internet broadcaster - producing and distributing new content of poetic value for a network with an instant, global reach.

As technology increasingly finds its way into our homes, into our libraries, lecture and class-rooms – with, for example, interactive whiteboards rolling-out though schools and universities – this system provides quality and diverse multi-media cultural content at the click of a mouse.

The website promises to be one of the most innovative and significant public spaces for poetry yet seen.

Paul Beasley is the Director of 57 Productions

57 Productions
57 Effingham Road
Lee Green
London SE12 8NT
Tel: +44 (0)20 8463 0866
info@57productions.com
© 2006 57 Productions

Digital Poetry Goes Live!

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