Filming or recording your poetry

Most people carry a perfectly good recording device in their pockets. Smart phones can be used to record sound and video without need to download any new application. There is no requirement for fancy editing apps either. When starting out try to keep your recordings short (turn your phone on its side for best view videos).

You can share these recordings at an event or with friends of the organisation. You can use them to promote or to campaign. Sharing can be a little trickier. Sometimes files are too big to email and need to be shared by online file sharing or uploading to websites and videos are easily shared via YouTube.

Please be sure to consider and seek permission from anyone you can see or hear in the recordings before sharing online.

Online Resources

Using the Internet to access poetry

Why might you want to do this?

• To exemplify the form you’re going to use with a group

• As a fun introduction to the process, breaking the ice

Where to look

There are many sites, official and otherwise, on line where you can find examples of poetry you might want to use. The following are some of the most useful:

The Poetry Foundation Poems | Poetry Foundation

The Scottish Poetry Library Scottish Poetry Library - The world's leading resource for Scottish poetry

The Poetry Archive Poetry Archive

Interesting Literature About – Interesting Literature

There are many other sites for accessing poems but, if you intend to make public use of a poem, it’s well to remember it should be in the public domain.

Finding work by particular poets is simple. Just google “Poet’s Name" with the word "Poems" and a variety of sites appear.

Finding particular poems can be more tricky. Google the title and author and, if the poem is available it’ll come up. Even googling a remembered phrase or quote from a poem can often find a poem you want. Be careful with this. Searching in this way can often lead to a post by an individual of a modern poem which may not be in the public domain.

If you’re looking for a type of poem, such as poems based on lists or acrostics, simply google the type. There are lots of useful sites. Often these will contain useful step by step explanations of how to produce a given type. Search for How to write a …

It’s helpful to do a search on Google for poems dealing with the subject you intend to research, such as poems about community or poems about isolation. A very good tip is to search for children’s poems on a subject as they are likely to be easily accessible by any audience.