OLD FAMILY MOVIES: POETRY VIDEO

7-7-2009: Houston, Texas www.oldfamilymovies.com

PRESS RELEASE

NEW-MEDIA MEMOIR: OLD FAMILY MOVIES: Poetry Video

Home/Class Study Course DVD/Book Quick Start Guide

Robert Kirschten, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English, Director of Creative Writing, Prairie View A&M University

CELEBRATE:

Family, Traditional American Values, Childhood Recollection, Spiritual Communion with Ancestors, Memory of Times Past

OLD FAMILY MOVIES: POETRY VIDEO consists of a book of poems plus a 40-minute DVD, with ten videos of poems from the book. The videos are digital movies, consisting of the poet reading his poems accompanied by slideshows, old movie footage from the 1930s, photographs dating from the 1920s through the 90s, and animated text. They are a new form of personal memory, produced by mixing the traditional genre of nostalgic, performed lyric with 21st Century, visual technology.

The DVD includes the following videos, ranging from 3 to 12 minutes: “Morgan Park, 1889,” “My Mother’s Kindergarten Classroom,” “Mother, Rhea Kirschten,” “Mickleberry’s Log Cabin Restaurant,” “Old Family Movies,” “My Father’s Tie Rack,” ”Unwrapping Christmas Ornaments,” “Hudson Avenue,” “My Father’s Death Certificate,” and “Minnie Minoso” [Chicago White Sox].

“My Mother’s Kindergarten Classroom” is a joyous look at the details of an old kindergarten classroom, where the poet’s mother taught on the South Side of Chicago for 40 years. “My Father’s Death Certificate” is a 12-minute, grieving ritual, in which the poet recalls his love for a father, still loved and missed many years after death. “Minnie Minoso” is a tribute to the nostalgic memory of baseball, centering on the left fielder who played for the Chicago White Sox in the 1950s.

Most important to note: OLD FAMILY MOVIES is not only about the poet’s family;

it is a new-media way about how everyone can now remember family.

About the Author

Robert Kirschten is the author of James Dickey and the Gentle Ecstasy of Earth: A Reading of the Poems; “Approaching Prayer”: Ritual and the Shape of Myth in A.R. Ammons and James Dickey; and five books of poems, Old Family Movies, Nighthawks and Irises: Poems about Paintings, Chicago Poems, Looney Tunes: A Comic Book of Poems, and Fribble and Wheeze: a post postmodern Book of Poems.

Kirschten is the editor of Critical Essays on James Dickey, “Struggling for Wings”: The Art of James Dickey, James Dickey: The Selected Poems, and Critical Essays on A.R. Ammons.

Company Name: The Vanity of Human Wishes Press

Company Contact: Robert Kirschten

Company Phone: 281-256-1276

Company Site: www.oldfamilymovies.com

Category: Performing Arts

Paperback: 64 pages. ISBN: 978-0-9798401-0-4 $18.88 (plus shipping)