What is this about?

As recently as 1990, the public generally understood poetry as a written artform that was published in books, magazines, or journals. Today, performance, the cinema, and new media have broadened the public's understanding of poetry as a living art. People attend poetry revues, which are now common through the developed world. People watch poetry video online, in festivals, and on broadcast media. And since the millennium, many people have interacted with hypermedia poetry. With all these shifts, there comes the need to publish poetry in a time-based form.

The e-poets network responds to this need by presenting the Videotheque. Our first edition went online in 1999. This edition, the second, is a significant increase in quantity and quality of content. It's a collection of clips that we feel are worth sharing with audiences the world over, to help them enjoy, understand, and possibly study the poets in our community.

There are two broad categories of poetry videos, documentation videos and art videos. This website embraces both. The arts within these videos further diversify both categories. For our purposes, however, this categorization is sufficient. The viewer can look at videos as final artworks, or look through the videos to examine the art within. Both approaches work for both categories of video.

The collection offers good prospects for study. Poetry video emerged as a recognized genre in the early 1990s, and made significant advances in the United States and Canada all through the following decade. However, the critical groundwork for the genre was established well before that. Important collaborations between poets and filmmakers arose in the 1940s, and even earlier. Needless to say, the evolution of poetry continues. The e-poets Videotheque captures poetry in video form from the early 1990s and forward.

Enjoy the Videotheque! Spend a little time browsing here. If you have questions about this website, or would like to submit a poetry video of your own for presentation among our collections, see the contact page. Thanks for "tuning in!"

- Kurt Heintz, 2012