Free Your Poetry by Sam Love

As poets we are really anachronisms walking around on two legs. You struggle to get the perfect image committed to paper, suffer through the rejections in a publishing world where the acceptance rate for most publications and “esites” is less than two percent.  Then you discover that the lit mag that discovered your masterpiece has a circulation of less than 1,000. 

I read somewhere that someone said, “The fastest way to obscurity is to become a poet.” So what is a poet to do in a hustle bustle age where people are so addicted to their digital gadgets they suffer from short attention span disorder?

Well you could take advantage of the new media and explore a visual medium for your work. Throw yourself into the e-verse. If a piece works on the web it can even help sell your books or lead people to your published poem. Then you can bask in your Andy Warholian fifteen minutes of fame.

So how do you bring your words alive? Here are a few tips.

Do a decent recording of your work. I can’t tell you how many shaky marginal audio clips I see on Facebook.  Frankly they are painful to watch. So what can you do to improve the recording?  First get a tripod that can hold the IPhone steady. Just check IPhone adapter on the web to find one. Second get close to the speaker so the little mike on the headset can pick out the audio from the background.  If the venue uses a sound system it may mean you should position yourself close to the speakers where the sound is actually coming from. 

If you are a fan of radio you could create a channel on Sound Cloud and upload an audio file of your recording there. It is easy to share it to Facebook or one of the others.

Here are some other tips:

1. Keep it short. Unfortunately people really do have short attention spans so if your masterpiece drones on good luck at holding a viewer.
2. Make the recording more visually interesting.  People can only watch a talking head so long. Just take a cue from the music videos. The sound is there but they also visually pop.
3. Take advantage of the radical changes in equipment. When I started a video production company years ago it cost thousands to get a decent camera and editing suite. Now you can do it with a laptop and smartphone. Or invest in a digital camera that captures incredibly sharp video and great audio. If you can’t do it yourself find some teenager who took a production course in high school.
4. Take a cue from advertising. It is not an accident they put humor in commercials. Humor engages the audience if it’s done well and doesn’t offend the current politically correct climate.
5. If you put something up let people know about it. 
6. There are so many platforms on the web now, but Facebook and YouTube still can reach a huge audience. They both have their strengths and make it easy to share a posting.  

Lets face it most poetry is not going to compete with the Kardashian culture, but if you want to see an example of one of my poetic videos (which was also a sneaky plug for my book Cogitation) check out “Jacuzzi Guilt” that had hundreds of views on Facebook views. It is on the buzz site of the Unsolicited Press web page.  

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Sam Love is the author if COGITATION, a poetry collection. You can buy it on our website and from major retailers.