Technology provides new ways to enjoy poetry. Film makes it possible for poetry to have a visual face. "The Force of Poetry" is a poetry reading and talk on the meaning, mechanics and significance of poetry. In an hour long program, poet Timothy Victor Richardson whose work impressed Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky, starting in 1986, reads from his collection, "Afflicted Love". The film goes far beyond a poetry reading. It uses the visual medium of television to put poetry on the screen, line by line, as it is being read. Further, as Richardson reads, lines appear on the screen allowing the viewer to watch the poem grow and the shape of its stanzas emerge and when the poet explains the complexities of formal forms, lines are highlighted to explain rhythm and rhyme.

Asked why poetry is so important, Richardson quotes Joseph Brodsky: "...verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of consciousness, of thinking, of comprehending the universe." Then, he relates a story of how one of Brodsky's poems gave a prisoner in the Gulag the strength to survive. "We shouldn't take our freedoms for granted or confuse art with entertainment. Great art can possess the moral force to save lives. In the aggregate, art can keep the mental life of a culture sane and alive," says Richardson.

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View a preview of this film at: https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1052756