For immediate release:

The Performance Poetry Preservation Project is proud and excited to announce the launch of their new website, which went live on November 30, 2015.

The result of more than a year of behind the scenes design and construction, the new P4 website is the go-to location for all information about the goals and activities of P4.  The new website is also slated to grow into a portal to the thousands of hours of slam history and performances that the non-profit organization is collecting and preserving.  

Some features of the new site include:

• A blog to be filled with entries relating to slam history, current events, and items of interest to the poetry slam community.
• The weekly "Featured Poem", showcasing a special audio or video work from the P4 Collection, and the poet that created it.
• A full description of the goals of the organization, current and future work, and the broad community that is supporting and building the P4 preservation archive.
• Details on the P4 Collection itself, including statistics on the size of the collection, scope and guidelines, information on IP and copyright, and ways the public can gain access to the collection.
• A brief overview of slam's origin and history, slam today, slam competitions, and a constantly updated directory of slams across the United States and Canada.

Visitors to the new P4 website are invited to create accounts and participate in discussions on the P4 blog.  Creating a P4 account will also allow users access to the P4 collection, as it begins to come on line in 2016, and will allow the broader poetry community the opportunity to become more deeply involved in all the exciting work that P4 is doing to preserve and protect the history of the poetry slam movement.

Visit the new P4 website today at http://poetrypreservation.org.

About the Performance Poetry Preservation Project:

The Performance Poetry Preservation Project (P4) is the only community-supported, grass-roots effort that protects and preserves the recorded history of the poetry slam movement. P4 possesses a living, growing, and carefully curated performance poetry archive, whose ambition is to collect and catalog a broad representation of the slam movement.  P4 believes in the power of the poetry slam to change lives, and are dedicated to preserving the great poetry that crosses hundreds of slam stages, all over the world.  

Without a concerted effort, much of the legacy of a modern performance poetry movement will soon be lost. The Poetry Slam movement is a relatively new development in contemporary culture, and it showcases and encourages numerous underrepresented poetic voices. It's spontaneous and grass-roots nature, however, means that critical live performances are often not collected or adequately archived.

But there is hope! Many reading series, slams, and open mics across the country are now recording their events, and the technology to do so is coming within reach for many more each year. Changing technology is leading to a popular wave of poetry recording that is sure to dwarf all of our past efforts.  The challenge is that this is rapidly evolving technology, and very few of those capturing poetry in performance understand the extremely ephemeral nature of the recordings that they make. Without proper storage, care and stewardship, many of these recordings will simply become unreadable in as little as five to ten years. The media will deteriorate, formats will change, or they will simply be discarded due to a lack of a repository to properly preserve them. Simply put, that stack of CDs on the Slammaster’s shelf will one day be as useless as a drawer full of computer punch cards or a box of 5 ¼ inch floppy disks.  A whole generation of poetry history and performance is in danger of being lost.

P4 was formed to tackle this problem, by creating a digital home for the creative output of the poetry slam community.

Questions?  Contact the P4 team for more information.