Videotaping Bill The Poetry Revolution About R. Virgil Ellis

R Virgil Ellis Videotaping Bill         (for William Stafford) on the porch of Emma Lou's cabin I worry if her mountain waterfall will smother his voice as musical as that, and more relaxed. I want my camera to catch his readiness to smile, the fierceness of his concentration, how he listens carefully to what anyone says, the quickness of his eyes and brow. In the hills above Salt Lake City I wonder why I want to frame him in the replica of the Mormon village, this man who leads us to the edge where this world meets the next never claiming, I have found it, urging instead do in your life what you say in your poem. Will the wind blur his voice, I fret, though he is comfortable sitting on sand, picking a stem from grass waving in front of him, ready to read wherever I choose, open to the world, he said, like a puppy ready to chase any rabbit that comes along. Driving back to the cabin I talk about funding, my paltry grant, to the man who minutes earlier stood with a rippling mountain lake behind him, the great salt one far below. He read "Witness," his hand reaching out, this man who stood against the "good" war, who's quick to help with the dishes, who says now, your company is honorarium enough. The Poetry Revolution The way many poets begin, we imagine, is a few words typed out with respect and wonder, in isolation and silence. Out of all the billions of humans there are many thousands of poets, or maybe even a few million, which is why at our upcoming conference we have scheduled forty. It's a very modest number, we know; however next year our brochure will boast one hundred. That's a lot of readers to fit into the four hours of conference time but with 2.4 minutes apiece each can read a decent-sized poem if she or he walks briskly on and off the stage. This can work very well especially if we forbid those wordy introductions that so often take away more from the poem than they give. Since our goal is to give more and more poets a chance, the following year we feel we can schedule two hundred, which seems like a lot. However we'll be selecting the shorter poems among those submitted, and we'll coach the readers to step on and off a smoothly running conveyor that will take exactly seventy-two seconds to traverse the stage. The year after that we're planning a daring experimental coup. We'll put all two hundred on risers the way they do for the Hallelujah chorus. Even though they'll all be reading at once, each can take four hours. Imagine the incredible juxtapositions and the odds against split seconds of silence. You can see how such an event would attract poets from other states. For 2004 we'll put eight-hundred readers in the auditorium and have a very select audience on stage. With a modest increase in the fees the event will be totally self-supporting! We'll invite notable critics, educators, business leaders, certainly Tommy Thompson, even President Gingrich. Our plans for 2005 are firm. In cooperation with local businesses, thousands of poets will pay well for sponsored space in bars, banks, and hotel lobbies as well as in corporate offices and the governor's mansion. Remote learning multimedia hookups will link them all with colleges and universities, even private homes and bus-stops! As Gil Scott-Heron once said, the revolution will be televised. But the poetry revolution will be everywhere? R. Virgil Ellislives near Cambridge, Wisconsin. Recent work appears in Fiction International's issue #33 on the mad and psychotic, Switched-on Gutenberg, Recursive Angel, 2River View, The Wolf Head Quarterly. The Lucid Stone has just published Ron's long poem, "On Clark's Island," in its 7th Anniversary Issue, Spring 2002.