Read “In the Attic.”

Read the interview.

L.A., Poets & Videotape by Hilda Weiss and Wayne Lindberg

You might be surprised by the number of poets, local and national, who read and perform their work in Los Angeles. Since January, 2007, we (Hilda Weiss and Wayne Lindberg) have videotaped over 250 of them and posted the results on our website, www.Poetry.LA (that’s “.LA” — not “.com” or “.org”).

We’ve taped a wide spectrum, from esoteric evenings at Venice’s legendary Beyond Baroque to the raucous finals of a national poetry slam competition in Hollywood. We’ve even showed up at a book launch reading in a poet’s backyard.

We take our two Cannon GL2 cameras, tripods, microphones, and performance release forms to poetry events at cafes, bookstores, night clubs, libraries, book fairs, community centers, and theater spaces. We tape open mic nights, featured appearances by poetry stars like Kay Ryan (current U.S. Poet Laureate; see photo left), Anne Carson, and Tony Hoagland and popular slam and spoken word performers like Gina Loring, Andrea Gibson, and Jack McCarthy.

We post our 10-minute videos at our YouTube channel (called “venuer”), and link them to our website. We’ve also taped 15 interviews with poets, publishers, and poetry series hosts. Our YouTube channel currently averages 1500 views per week.

You may ask, “Why and how did you come to be doing this?”

Hilda says: As I started writing more poetry and going to more poetry readings, I often wanted to describe and explain the poets’ performances to Wayne and other friends. I couldn’t do justice to the events. It was hard to portray the emotion and energy in a reading, and it was frustrating not being able to remember the words in the poems (how do you capture the essence of a poem without the words that make it poetry?). I found myself wanting to experience the reading again. But how?

Wayne says: In the early 2000’s Hilda and I began attending poetry readings together. When YouTube came online, we saw there was a synergy. We could video poets performing in small venues, put them on YouTube and multiply their audience by many times.

The Next Steps.

Our local venues and poets were receptive to the idea and we shot our first videos at a coffee shop (blender running in the background) where the Redondo Poets a long-running poetry reading series hosts a weekly event.

We created a webpage (www.Poetry.LA) to act as a portal to the videos. It promotes the most recent videos and gives people a tool to search the archives. Through the webpage, viewers can explore the local So Cal poetry scene: search for poets by name or venue, see interviews of venue hosts, and find venues and poetry resources.

Through the internet our work has attracted the attention of people across the US and around the world. The Poetry Society of America has asked if they can post some of our videos on their website, and we recently received payment from a Dutch TV station which will be using footage we taped of the late Deborah Digges on their “Dead Poets Almanac” program.

We hope you’ll take a look!

Check out the translation.

Read “Bliss, Idaho” in flashquake.

You must buy Matt’s book.

And while you’re at it, read his interview with the Writer Profile Project. (But excuse the weird formatting. Apparently the website upgrade screwed some stuff up. I’ll try to get to that soon…)

And definitely read his stories in FRiGG!!!! “Knuckleball” is here, and “Landing on the Moon” is here.

Read the translation here.

Read the English version here.

Well, a lot has happened since we last corresponded. I gave away my guinea pigs (traded them in for a small dog that looks like a poodle), moved back to the U.S. from Japan, and I’m currently applying to fourteen MFA programs (Don’t ask how much those apps are costing).

Writing wise, I had a story accepted by the Bellevue Literary Review which is in the current fall 09 issue. The editors over there are awesome. As you probably know, One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories was launched last April at the Oxford Literary Festival. I did a live interview in the virtual world of Second Life shortly thereafter with my “way cooler than me” avatar. The project founder, Ovo Adagha, sat in the audience in his virtual coat and tie. It was pretty cool in that people in the audience were tuning in from several different countries, and I could converse with them while still being in my pajamas. The book has been doing well, has gotten some good reviews and is even being used in a couple of high schools.

I’m steadily working on stories for a collection that blends Japanese folklore with modern issues, as well as a novel centering on the interconnected lives of four people affected by the ‘95 Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo Metro. At the moment, I’m pretty busy taking notes for a critical essay (in part for my own amusement but also for an application) focusing on the use of language in dystopian literature with special regard to Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole.

Other than that, I’m watching a bunch of Vampire television series like everyone else.

The Short Review’s One World Anthology Review.

Sequoia Nagamatsu on Treet TV talking about One World.