How it began...

On Thursday, June 15th, I felt like doing something a bit different for Poetry Thursday. I posted a video that I found at YouTube. It was a video of a 'poem road' in Taiwan, and I found it to be quite inspirational. Here's my original post where you can watch the Taiwan video.

I thought, what a great idea--a road where one could read poetry along the way. Not with a book in hand, but because the poetry was part of the landscape. Then I had a thought: what if we created our own poem road? How would we go about doing that? It occurred to me that I could create a video using photos from all of us. We could each print out a poem we like, place it in a favorite public place, and photograph it. We could add additional photos of the location to add atmosphere. Participants could email the photos to me and I'd piece them together in Windows Movie Maker and add some music. We'd, in essence, be creating a video poetry road, incorporating many locations. I asked readers to email their photos to me within a week and that I'd post the video 'poem road' the following Thursday (June 22nd) in time for the next Poetry Thursday deadline.

Liz and Lynn, creators of Poetry Thursday, seemed to like the poem road idea and Lynn kindly mentioned it at the Poetry Thursday site. She asked if I'd be willing to extend the one-week deadline so that more people could participate, and of course I was happy to do that. Then I got a comment from Laura who asked if I'd be open to having this idea expand even further. Here's her comment in its entirety:

Love this idea. You may or may not want to do this but I saw at Poetry Thursday that you are extending this a week...does there have to be a time limit? Can this keep going? I want to participate but this week may be tough and this feels like something that could go on and on...is this something bigger...I mean really bigger...than a group project for a week or two? Could this be a movement? A wave?

So I did the next logical thing--I created this blog because it seems like the idea should have a place of its own. This project was never about me--I just offered to be a conduit for those who'd like to join me in creating a video poem road. But I'd like to hear your thoughts now.

What would you like the Poem Road project to look like? Would you like to (a la Poetry Thursday) create your own video poem road and post a permalink to it in the comments here? (No time deadline required--it could be an ongoing, open-ended project.) Would you like to stay with the idea of sending a few photos of your poem in a public place to me via email and have me create a composite video from participant entries (with a time deadline agreed to by consensus)? You tell me. I'd love to hear any and all thoughts, suggestions and ideas you have about Poem Road. Maybe we could really have some fun with this.