We have some new poetry on tap from Sheema Kalbasi, Alessio Zanelli and Tony Jones. Sheema also tipped me off to a very good short film and hopes our read­ers will view the movie here.

The film­maker in ques­tion, Hossein Martin Fazeli, is also a poet. One I hope to pub­lish here soon.

*     *     *     *     *

If I had another life to live, I think I would be a film­maker. The abil­ity to make art that way, to com­bine prose, poetry, music, sound­scapes, land­scapes, paint­ings, pho­tog­ra­phy, motion. It has it all. And I don’t think that “all” has been fully exploited. One could do a life of a poet, a musi­cian, a nov­el­ist, a painter, a philoso­pher. One could uti­lize most of our senses and hint at the rest. He or she could cre­ate a world and go beyond any one form of art by itself.

Of course, it can not match the sus­tained con­nec­tion between reader and writer pro­voked by the great­est works of lit­er­a­ture, or focus our atten­tion on one image like the great­est paint­ings and sculp­tures, but it could place and replace words on the screen to stir dif­fer­ent emo­tions and links. It could and should pro­voke us to expe­ri­ence the mul­ti­plic­ity of art forms in a sin­gle sit­ting. Never to be the end all and be all. But one more cat­a­lyst. One more out­reach pro­gram. One more ini­ti­a­tion expe­ri­ence to beat the band.