Poets in a Lens
The blog is an astonishingly versatile way of publishing material on the web – and Roger has just pointed me to a very neat and ingenious use of the medium.
Blogger Jeremy James explains that his late father, David, was a keen photographer, and a lover of poetry. He attended many poetry readings in the north-east of England, and took photographs of the readers, the audiences and whatever detail of the venue or the event caught his eye. He put together a number of these photographs, with commentary, into a little book which he tried without success to have published. On his death Jeremy and his brother found the ring binder which contained the book, and it occurred to Jeremy that the chapters would work very well as blog posts.
Poets in a Lens, the resultant blog, is a charming memorial to a man with broad interests and talents – it is also a wonderful record of poetry readings in the north-east in the seventies and eighties. Many of those pictured are still on the scene: there’s a lovely picture of a young Peter Mortimer, another of Cynthia Fuller, and an almost unrecognisable Neil Astley. I remember that wallpaper in the Colpitts, too!