“Publishing: where content goes to die.” So reads a slide from a recent talk by media scholar Ernesto Priego. I thought of this an hour later when I happened to check the website for an exhibition of sound-enhanced poetry and film-poems at the Cube Gallery in Leicester, UK last month, and discovered that even more of my poetry had been included in the film reels than I had thought would be: in addition to my own videopoems Note to Self and The Banjo Apocalypse, Marc Neys’ film Taking the Waters, which includes a prose poem of mine, was also among the videos projected in a continuous loop onto the wall of a gallery for three weeks. And my soundtrack for Shackleton’s Banjo was available at one of the listening stations.

That’s an almost embarrassing level of exposure for a writer who rarely bothers to send anything out for publication. My attitude tends to be why bother, when I can just post stuff to the web? Besides, any time I don’t spend on my own work is devoted to curating other peoples’ work at Moving Poems. But I sometimes wonder how many web visitors watch anything longer than a minute all the way through, or read any poem longer than ten lines.

The quality of attention of gallery- and museum-goers, on the other hand, is in a class by itself, something a skillful curator can turn into a kind of active participation. I gather that the listening stations and film-poem screens at the Poems, Places & Soundscapes exhibition were deliberately juxtaposed in such a manner as to encourage visitors to make connections between unrelated audio and film footage. And that’s pretty wonderful, I think.

But whether it’s YouTube or an art gallery in the UK, non-traditional venues offer as well the always-tantalizing possibility that one’s poems will be heard by people outside the sometimes claustrophobic community of professional poets.

Which is not to say I don’t also value the kind attention of my fellow writers, of course. I was honored this winter when two of the poems from my Bear Medicine series were remixed into videopoems via The Poetry Storehouse, one by Nic Sebastian and the other by Donna Vorreyer — two of my favorite poets. Translating a poem into another language or medium entails a special kind of very close reading, as I know from my own experience, so it was gratifying to realize that writers this good were reading my work in that way.

https://vimeo.com/88640282

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Thanks to Nic, Donna, and Marc, as well as the organizers of the Poems, Places & Soundscapes exhibition—Mark Goodwin of air to hear and Brian Lewis of Longbarrow Press—for helping to keep my web-published content alive.