YouTube Censors Poetry Reader

Contributing writer Travis King is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist from Oregon. He has a long-standing love/hate relationship with technology but is excited about exploring the opportunities the Internet presents in the field of poetry.

I was recently directed to an interesting article in the Chicago Sun-Times regarding a YouTube channel called SpokenVerse. SpokenVerse is an amazing channel. Created on August 8, 2008, it consists at this point of nearly 500 videos, each a reading of an English-language poem by the anonymous user known only as Tom O’Bedlam, a name itself derived from an anonymous poem of the early 17th century. O’Bedlam’s voice is well suited to reading poetry, and he makes each piece stand out as art. What’s more, he makes it an enjoyable multimedia experience; each reading is accompanied by a text version of the poem as well as visual art that ties in with the poem’s theme.

The Sun-Times article linked to above focuses primarily on the controversy surrounding one of these photographs. A few months ago, on March 13, O’Bedlam uploaded his reading of “The Cinnamon Peeler,” a beautiful and erotic piece by Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient. Although currently a resident of Canada, Ondaatje hails originally from Sri Lanka, and at the end of the video, after the reading and presentation of the text, viewers were presented with a century-old black-and-white photograph of a Sri Lankan woman with one breast bared. As stated in the article, this photograph was determined by some of YouTube’s users and employees to violate their guidelines, which prohibit nudity except in an “educational, documentary and scientific” context, and so it was removed. Numerous protests were lodged, and eventually the photograph was reviewed in more detail. One can only assume its artistic merits were recognized, because the decision was reversed, and the video was reinstated. I present it here for your own consideration:



Unfortunately, reinstatement seemed to come too late. Mr. O’Bedlam, apparently offended by the censorship of an artistic photo that reflected the erotic nature of the spoken and textual art it accompanied, posted a statement to his channel that he would be uploading no more videos. He recently changed his mind, and after a two-month hiatus, he has returned to YouTube, uploading another twenty poems in the past week. Based on the comments of regular subscribers, it’s obvious that they’re pleased by this decision, although they supported him in his original decision, as well. I too am pleased. Having just found this channel, I look forward not only to listening to those pieces already posted but also seeing it continue to grow.

In this day and age, many of us are often on-the-go, with increasingly less time just to sit back and enjoy reading poetry. Listening to poetry while working or commuting is a simpler and—when the voice of the presenter is as entrancing as Tom O’Bedlam’s—perhaps more enjoyable way of experiencing it. For those of you with YouTube access on a portable device, such as an iPhone, access to this art is only a few finger movements away, almost anywhere your life takes you. Although the controversy over the Sri Lankan photograph shows that there is still room for debate over what is pornography and what is art—and just whom, in this digital age, shall decide the difference—nevertheless, there can be no debate that the Internet makes such art more easily accessible and allows for its presentation in a number of different ways. I, for one, look forward to discovering what more YouTube and the rest of the Internet have to offer in the way of presenting poetry in a fashion that takes advantage of its multimedia capabilities.

I leave you with another poem from SpokenVerse, Ovid's "Corrinae Concubitus," as translated by Christopher Marlowe. Strangely, though it too contains erotic imagery, in the form of paintings, it was not removed from YouTube.