Poet1969

I know about public readings, the pop performance, the funny audience poems anything-for-a-thrill. In this film I wanted to avoid all that, hoping to get an inner view by way of quiet, five to ten minute of a private reading, keeping the camera as nerveless as possible, letting the poet talk his poems into being language without the interpretive art. I wish I'd been able to film it invisibly. Nine poets came along, separately, to a quiet room, and when they'd reached the point where the camera was just another piece of furniture, they read to themselves, and I picked it up. I think of this film as a book of reference, like I Ching, like the Oxford English Dictionary, Like Leonardo's Notebooks. The poets who take part: Jack Hirschman, Asa Benveniste, Hugh Manning, Nathaniel Tarn, Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth, Jim Dine, Jeff Nuttall, Bob Cobbing.