He’s Giving a Visible Look to Language in New Poetry Series

Lawrence Pitkethly says he reads poetry alone, thinks about poetry alone and writes poetry alone. But he’ll talk about poetry with just about anybody who’s interested.

Pitkethly is executive producer of the public television series “Voices and Visions,” featuring the work of 13 American poets, and its vision is largely his. The production’s innovation was putting words on screen; it’s about seeing language.

“The key thing, really, was to try and discover the poems,” Pitkethly said. “We wanted to ‘take language by the throat’ and say, ‘Look, this is our subject.’ And in the end, that’s what every viewer is conducted back to--very gently, but very deliberately. ‘OK, folks, this is a film about poetry; the theater you’re watching tonight is language, and at some point you’ll have to let yourself go and watch it.’ ”

Each film in the series includes a certain amount of biographical information, making use of whatever archival photographs and films and manuscripts are available, as well as footage of places the poets lived and wrote about, along with extensive interviews with modern poets and scholars and people who knew the poets. The main element, however, is the poetry itself.

“What we are in fact doing, with the text-on-screen thing, is playing around with a new form, a new way of presenting poetry--a performance of poetry,” said Pitkethly, who is director of the New York Center for Visual History, a nonprofit film production, research and archival company. “We’re doing something that’s actually never been done on television before.”

Pitkethly thinks of each episode as a film essay. By necessity, a canon of 13 poets has been established (because the series is limited to 13 weeks), but beyond that, the series does not assert or adhere to a single critical perspective. These are individual films on individual poets, with different directors and writers and producers. (Tonight’s installment, at 10 p.m. on Channel 28, is on Wallace Stevens. The subject next week is Elizabeth Bishop; due in May are programs on Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.)

Pitkethly is a creative producer (he directed four films in the series) with a clear-minded intensity about his work. Although he is polite, he has an aloof authority and a college professor’s vague air of impatience. He has the rakish good looks associated with Romantic poets: tall and lanky, with boyish, somewhat long brown hair and a craggy face.

Pitkethly grew up in Northern Ireland, went to school in England and got his start in television and documentary film making with the BBC, as a producer, director and on-air commentator. He speaks in rapid-fire, grammatically correct sentences, with an American-sounding accent.

“I junked my accent,” he said, “because I very quickly--I would say within five minutes of arrival--discovered that I liked the idea of American republicanism, ‘down with the King’ and all that.”

Critics who believe that poetry is a performance art, that poems are not poetry until they are in some way performed and interpreted are probably wild about the uninhibited presentation of language in “Voices and Visions.” The visual sequences, in which text appears on screen, help penetrate the printed matter, and they’re apt to generate the same kind of enthusiasm people have for songs, movies, music videos and even certain commercials.

“Well, that’s the idea--to make the language happen, to somehow play with it. And if we fall flat on our faces--well, you know, sometimes you do, and sometimes you don’t. But there will be those who say, ‘MTV! Poetry goes RoboCop! It’s the end of the world as we’ve known it. This is the last refuge of the intellectual and you’ve taken it from us!’ Forget it. You were never walking on Persian carpets anyway. I think our contemporary poets have tended to stay with a kind of 19th-Century mode of presentation. Nothing wrong with that; it’s simply that the major mode of communication in the culture is this little screen; we’ve used it for just about everything else, so why don’t we use it for poetry? But there’s a kind of cultural gap to doing that. To me it’s simply a problem of not using the medium.

“I think that these days, where poetry has lost its readership, it’s hard for a poet to reach his audience and for the audience to hear his poetry, to see it, to feel it,” he went on. “I was in a taxi cab yesterday, and I mentioned that we’ve just done this series on poetry. ‘Poetry, what’s that?’ asks the cab driver. I said, ‘You know, when people put words together, and it rhymes sometimes, and they talk about their feelings and things.’ He says, ‘Oh yeah, that.’

“So OK, maybe the poet writes in the one case for the page, for his ideal reader, the one person in the world who reads him, but in order to communicate a little bit to the people who may not normally hear him, he might play around a little bit with modes of communication that are a little bit, ah, sophisticated, because it seems to me the television medium is staring people in the face.”

Pitkethly currently has his sights set on producing, in conjunction with KCET Channel 28 in Los Angeles, another ambitious, 13-hour series for public television, this one on the history of American cinema.