Billy Collins / Video Poetry / Bjork

Billy Collins is a past poet laureate and I think his video poetry is just fantastic. Marrying an artist and a poet together for a project is a fascinating way to produce work. I enjoyed these and if you go to Billy Collins and Poetry in the video section of Google, you will find five or six more. They are all have different artists and looks to them. Here is one of them

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I have to admit that I am a closet Bjork fan and I love her videos. One of my favorites is Oceania which is below along with Pagan Poetry. She has been an innovative artist, integrating music and images long before it was a popular web format. Let me know what you think of these videos.

Oceania

Pagan Poetry

Maria McKee, Video Art Books, and the Spring Issue.

March 20, 2007
We are looking forward to presenting some great fiction, poetry, essays, and visuals to you in the next issue. Spring is coming and we are gearing up for it.

Video Art Books
In the spring issue we will continue to bring the literary quality that you’ve come to expect from Miranda Literary Magazine, but you will also find some nice surprises. We have added a “Video Art Book” project to our visual arts section. These unique art books are turned into video productions, scored by professional musicians, to share this one-of-a-kind book. Ice Flows is up now for your viewing and in the spring we will add another unique video art book to add to the entire experience. This is a new way of sharing art books and altered books, and we are pleased to deliver this multimedia content.

Maria McKee
We are please to offer an interview with singer and songwriter Maria McKee. She was a founding member of the country rock band Lone Justice. She released her first self-titled solo album in 1989 which continues today with more than seven albums and collections of music.
Her song “Show Me Heaven”, which appeared on the soundtrack to the film Days of Thunder, was a number one single in the United Kingdom for four weeks in 1990. Later, her eerie, country-tinged single, “If Love Is a Red Dress (Hang Me in Rags)” was released on the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction(1994). In April, she will release her newest offering titled Late December, and we look forward to presenting her interview and cover the release of this album. Check out her Website or just click on the image.

Anthology
We are working on the pre-production for our first anthology. It is a significant endeavour and we hope that you are patience with us. We were hoping for a release that would coincide with the spring issue, but it seems that it might be pushed back a bit.

Lastly, we are have acquired our ISSN number which I had forgotten about until it came in the mail, so we are listed in the Library of Congress. It is our goals this year to offer advertising and begin making money that will be placed right back into our anthology project, Internet expenses, awards (down the road), and advertising. We have an outline of ad rates and hope to begin attracting advertisers. We would also like to represent the magazine at conferences like Recharging the Sensorium in Connecticut in April and perhaps make our mark if I go to the Juniper Writing Workshop Umass/Amherst. It also important to expand the magazine. I think we need to offer something more than a print magazine, with sound, video, interactive experiences, mingled with the traditional foundation that we have established. I hope you are as excited as I am about this coming year.

Sincerely,
Ron Samul
Publisher / Miranda Literary Magazine

Yusef Komunyakaa Judges Poetry Contest.

If you have friends, associates or peers who are talented poets,
please forward to them this message about the Many Mountains Moving
Press Poetry Book Contest Guidelines. This is a great opportunity for
many reasons.

Final Judge: Yusef Komunyakaa

Prize: The winner receives $500 and publication by MMM Press in 2008.

Deadline: May 1, 2007 (postmark).

Entry fee: $20

{Fee entitles entrants to a free back issue and the opportunity to buy
a new MMM Subscription for $10.00, and any of the MMM Press Books,
They Sing at Midnight, invisible sister, Feeding the Fear of the
Earth, or Silkie, also for $10. Please use the online entrant’s order
form if you want a free back issue or anything else.}

Full guidelines are at
http://mmminc. org/html/ contests2007. htm

If you are interested, I posted a link (at the top of this page) to
some candid notes from last year’s book contest. I tried to answer
questions that past and present entrants may have. I want to make it
clear how hard we try to do this the right way.

One of the greatest examples of how this work has paid off is the new
poetry book that we published in February 2007, and I hope you will
visit and revisit the MMM Press pages online.

MMM Press is unusually open to a diversity of styles, themes, forms
etc., and anyone can see this by browsing the books at the “MMM
Press” link at http://mmminc. org. In fact, Many Mountains Moving: a
literary journal of diverse voices even published some works from all
six of the finalists from last year’s poetry book contest, and they
are extraordinarily diverse as well as outstanding in many other ways.

At MMM Press, we also work hard with our authors to make the books as
great and as attractive as they can be, and we make many efforts on
behalf of our authors, including running ads in American Poetry
Review, Poets & Writers, the AWP Chronicle and elsewhere.

People with questions about the book contest that are still not
answered by all the information on the site can send them straight to
me at jeffreyethan@ att.net.

Many thanks,

Jeffrey Ethan Lee
Poetry Editor, MMM Press

Recharging the Sensorium: CSU Presents a Writing and Multimedia Dat of the Arts.

Campus of Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT.
Friday, April 27, 2007

CSU Systems Office, in conjunction with the Connecticut Review, the Helix, IMPAC-CSU Young Writers Trust and Drunkenboat.com, online journal of the arts, present a day dedicated to the conjunction of text with other media.

Despite the popular image of the solitary writer in a garret, writing is not an isolated art or stand-alone skill, especially these days. Writers’ expressions of the written word regularly combine with film, music, photographs, paintings, graphic illustrations and other arts, creating new, collaborative forms of composition. Newspaper reporters’ stories are brought to readers combined with photos from the field. Poets write lines to match music or find their lines set to music. Ekphrastic poetry, that is the verbal representation of visual representation, has grown exceedingly more popular.

More and more, the web brings together multimedia elements with streaming audio and video, fine art photographs and paintings-and an entire generation relies on the web for their information, entertainment and encounters with the arts. Here words are almost always embedded in a multimedia environment. The combination of words and multimedia is hardly new. Since the advent of recorded history, writing has come in a multimedia form. From the “performances” of scops, gleeman and jongleurs to illuminated manuscripts, language has often conjoined with the other arts.

We invite students and faculty from the four CSU campuses and local high schools to think imaginatively about writing in terms of the new, extensive multimedia reality. Recharging the Sensorium, the inaugural Writing and Multimedia Day of the Arts, will be devoted to examining the multiple connections between text and other media. It will address historical contexts and investigate the use of new technologies. This conference could potentially include collaborations across various disciplines such as (but not confined to) poetry, prose, visual culture, art history, musicology, photography, graphic novels, comparative literature, media archeology, dramaturgy, film, dance, performance, and the natural and behavioral sciences.

Conference Organizers: JP Briggs (WCSU) briggsjp@wcsu.edu, Ravi Shankar (CCSU) shankarr@ccsu.edu, David Cappella (CCSU) cappellad@ccsu.edu, and Andy Thibault (IMPAC-CSU Young Writers Trust) Tntcomm82@cs.com