On this site I want to make poetry enjoyable - I shall use various methods of illustration and some discussion. Therefore on this site we want to give you something variously slight to watch whilst you mainly listen - multimedia if you like.
This is a collaborative piece written with ShadoWork and interpreted liberally by me!
Another example of a poem performed by ShadoWork and interpreted with found images
This is an interpretation of one of my own poems simply “interpreted” with photographs - the poem is printed below
Be sure to call out loudly as you fall.
Hospital corridors lead yellowly past
gaggles of gap toothed x-ray machines
they put us in like tongues. Doors
with governors, fire doors, doors
with rubber buffers, crash
plates, silencers, rooms
of rumours, news by elimination,
guesswork, or by subtle shifting
to the door or just more queues.
We’ll treat them like a playground,
we’ll go the pretty way past the Gorgons,
the selfish Gods and their special mistakes.
I’ll use your wheelchair to support my aching
endoskeletal excess, you’ll push mine as
diseases pick at our almighty humour.
No-one will get our idiolect,
our idiot laughing, the fairy
lights, the stereo on the wheelchair.
Every indignity – we’ll mock it.
Under the taut linen snow we’ll undo
good works, mix drugs, careless of good opinions still.
Only alone will it be unbearable. Or watching
you in pain. Otherwise I’ll look forward to those
zinc-lined doors that we bang our trolleys into.
Though I’m so afraid that when we
drop through it will be like falling
overboard from a great liner in the dark.
I must be near. You must be sure to call out loudly as you fall.
I must dive over, throw myself out the airlock door to have a chance
of finding your other in whatever darkness may follow us and this and all.
Here is another poem broadly celebratory in theme and with a similar treatment.
Eventually elsewhere on the site we’ll put in some pure poetry films which we have managed to find - there are quite a few - and which we like and can get permission to show.
Notes on the collaborators will be on the About Us page and links to other interesting poetry sites on the links page.
The site is financed, “maintained” by and the responsibility of Brett Van Toen
Diorama