viz.

In continuing to focus on the intersection of poetry and visual media, I refer back to my post from last fall concerning the "docu-poems" of Susan Somers-Willet and Natasha Trethewey. Similarly, the poet Kwame Dawes is working in this hybrid medium with very moving and memorable results. Above is a screenshot from for his Emmy-winning web project Live, Hope, Love: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica. Of the project, the Dawes has said in an NPR interview, "[...] I write poems as a way to process and to work through the experience. And it also gives us an intimacy in the relationship with people." Although both Somers-Willet and Trethewey's projects emphasize orality as well as the visual, they feature the two poets reading their own work. Dawes's web project stresses the voices of those in the community he documents, which adds a level of intimacy to the readings. On his site, you can scroll over each of the following portraits to hear the voices of his readers:

Dawes was asked by the PBS NewsHour to begin a similar endeavor in Haiti. You can watch/listen to the poem "Tombs" (below).

It is somewhat difficult for me to look at these with a critical lens, since I find their impulses and results to be so admirable. This is poetry that attempts to engage the outside world, poetry that insists on its own utility even as or because it insists on the failure or regular news outlets or journalism to approach a comprehensive narrative. However, I do wonder what these projects do to the lyric, how they put pressure on the original boundaries of the form, what happens when readers become strictly viewers and listeners. That query is very general, but I'll keep thinking.