I’m studying poetry in its relationship to electronic media more closely than I have in the past.  For that reason, I’ve started up a netflix account. Here’s where I’m at so far.

Brave New Voices was a fun little reality show, but not enough poetry for me.  more about the poets… or prepping for the event and not enough of hearing the poems.

The Hip hop poetry jam and poets in hip hop appear to have been from the same night at the Ivar Theatre.  As with all readings, poetic quality and performance varries.  Some poets were more polished than others.  Production quality was pretty poor for these discs too.  Cameras didn’t match, we saw the floor too much, and the dynamic range of the audio was too large for television viewing.  When you stick the discs in a computer, one of them was called “untitled”, and one of them was called “will”.  That bugs me, but those watching in traditional viewing styles won’t notice.

I did enjoy that in between every poem read on stage, we were taken backstage where we had a quick moment with the poet talking about the poem that they read on stage.  The angles and camera movements kept these moving along visually while giving us insight into the poets poems.

I also watched the documentary entitled, “The Poetry Anthology: Romantic Poets“.  I enjoyed this and watched it twice while doing other computer work at like 5 in the morning.  I feel like I picked up some basic knowledge from the presentation.  I was entertained at what the creators of the doc chose to show when they didn’t have any b-roll to show.  I seem to recall generic streams that glistened for just a few too many times while the dialogue stretched underneath.  This doc was very much a here-watch-this-in-school documentary.

I probably wouldn’t recommend ordering any of these from netflix, but when pressed, I’d suggest the brave new voices series.  I’ll be working my way though the netflix selections on poetry and I’ll keep you posted as to what I find.  hopefully I’ll have an awesome recommendation for you, but not yet.