poetry

The Haiku Foundation Video Archive

/ Melissa Allen / 10 Comments

Hi all,

My friend Eve Luckring, who is a stellar filmmaker and poet, recently told me about an extremely cool project she is working on for The Haiku Foundation. I’m very excited about it because lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that haiku in English is usually not a very oral kind of poetry — mostly we write it and read it on paper, silently, and a lot of us don’t pay that much attention to how it sounds. I wish we would pay more attention to that, because I think a poem separated from its sound is a sad, half-realized thing. Sound is part of what makes a poem a poem.

Fortunately for me, Eve and some other people feel the same way and they got the idea that we should film haiku poets speaking their work aloud and preserve it for posterity so that in the future, we won’t just have the words of great poets, we’ll have their voices as well, and we’ll know how they wanted their haiku to sound as well as look. Thus was born The Haiku Foundation Video Archive. And a cool video about The Haiku Foundation Video Archive:

http://www.indiegogo.com/project/widget/55435

The only thing is, as you may realize, video equipment is not exactly free, and so an IndieGoGo campaign was also born, to raise funds to purchase equipment and defray other expenses of the Video Archive. If you have any cash to spare, I think a donation to this campaign would be well worth it, especially since there are some pretty cool perks to go along with your donation. Here’s the link:

http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Haiku-Foundation-Video-Archive

Thanks for considering donating to make the world a little bit noisier, in a haiku-ish kind of way.

 

poets in the spring all those other voices