Hello, everyone. It is a distinct pleasure to appear as guest blogger on Best American Poetry, one of my favorite online watering holes. I jet to London this Friday night for the annual book week festivities: four rare book shows, Christies and Sotheby's auctions, and my UK publication party for Sixty Sonnets at the Wheatsheaf pub, where I will read with Katy Evans-Bush and the renowned Ruth Fainlight. But before I go, I hope to bring you a week of whimsical poetic diversions. Over at my own blog, E-Verse Radio, I like to mix poems with some video content, both original and borrowed. One of the odder things I’ve stumbled upon while trawling the web is a “poem animation movie” of W.H. Auden “reading” “Musee des Beaux Arts,” posted by Jim Clark under the profile name “poetryanimations.” Have a look.
The creator of this video animates (I think of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Reanimator”) a still photograph of W.H. Auden, who passed away in 1973. Poor Auden, who described his face as a “wedding-cake left out overnight in the rain,” looks like nothing so much as a sinister Muppet in this video, perhaps one of the wise and wizened creatures that shambled through Jim Henson and Frank Oz's 1982 film Dark Crystal, which has matured into something of a cult film. The video animation is clearly intended as a loving tribute to the great rumpled English poet, but it would be dishonest of me to suggest that it is not in some measure disquieting. Others in the series of “animated poets” are Walt Whitman, Dante, John Donne, and Roberts Frost and Service. Alongside poets, one may enjoy animations of Samuel Pepys and Agatha Christie. This is a noble project, to be sure, but I can’t help but feel the results fall somewhere between the animatronic Hall of Presidents at Disney World and the British satirical puppet show Spitting Image (think of the Genesis video for “Land of Confusion”). In any case, visit Clark’s “poetryanimations” group on youTube and subscribe if you enjoy his videos.
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That video of Auden gives me the creeps.
Posted by: Marissa Despain | May 26, 2009 at 06:32 AM