A New Way Of Looking At Poetry

Todd Boss is a new and successful poet from Wisconsin whose work I enjoy immensely. What I find most appealing about his writing is the everyday subjects that he uses in his poems. From trips to the super market to the simple observations of his children, his poems contain subjects that everyone can relate to. Even "Yellowrocket", the title of his new book of poetry, derives from a poem within the book about his family's old farm where he describes yellowrocket, a common weed that grows there. It's the perfect title for a book filled with everyday sort of poems. I encourage all of you to check out his book. He's very much like a present day Robert Frost, in my opinion.


I can continue to spend a whole entry discussing why I enjoy his poetry so much (which I could do without effort, I assure you), but that is not the point of this specific entry. Instead, I would like to bring to your attention a project that Todd and a few others have been working on for some time that has recently called upon some attention in the media. I've had the opportunity of sitting in on one of Todd's poetry readings on campus, and afterward he shared a few snippets of this project with the audience.

The project was designed to allow poetry to become more accessible to a wider audience via the internet. The original goal was to find a way to help solve the problem of individuals having to go out to buy a whole book or volume of poems to enjoy a poet's work. Todd and fellow designers of the project wanted to present the poems in a way that would be entertaining and enjoyable, rather than the usual "googleing" of a specific work that leads you to another website where you can read the poem word for word off of your computer screen. That's when they developed the idea to create a way for readers to listen to the poem, in addition to watching a complimentary visual. This was the basis of what is now known as "Motionpoems", short videos that include a visual set to a recorded reading of a specific poem by its author.

There was a release of twelve of these new Motionpoems in Minneapolis tonight, in hopes that Todd and other contributors would get some input from the general public on how to further improve the project.


Here is a link to an interview with Todd on
MPR

And one to his page on
Youtube
with some examples of Motionpoems.

If you're interested in his book, "Yellowrocket" or the author himself, I will provide a link to his homepage where you can also find his Motionpoems, reviews of his book, and information on the author.