This year, on the 200th anniversary of Poe's birth, Baltimore has planned a year-long celebration of Poe's life. But the event that is capturing the most attention is coming up this weekend and has nothing to do with life at all.
Showing posts with label Poe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poe. Show all posts
Funeral 2.0: Baltimore Tells Poe to Never Say 'Nevermore'
This year, on the 200th anniversary of Poe's birth, Baltimore has planned a year-long celebration of Poe's life. But the event that is capturing the most attention is coming up this weekend and has nothing to do with life at all.
Zombie Poets Post to YouTube from Beyond the Grave
Most poets have pretty strong constitutions. It's pretty heard to shock or discomfit the poetry community, when a lot of what poetry is about is shocking or surprising readers. But the YouTube channel simply known as "poetryanimations" is sure to send a chill up any poet's spine.
This channel is complete with over four hundred videos of what appear to be classic portraits of poets paired with mock-recordings of their voices. The catch is, when you hit play the portraits begin to move as if they themselves were reciting. The result is very cool for poetry buffs, but a bit creepy. Here's an example of Emily Dickinson "reading" I Cannot Live with You:
Doesn't it seem a little like these poets have come back from the dead in these videos? Faces and voices that in the past we could only imagine now appear before us, reading poems that we know intimately. It's probably a little like the feeling our grandparents got when they saw Jack Benny on television for the first time, rather than the radio. A particularly eerie one is seeing and hearing Robert Frost read the nearly ubiquitous "Road Not Taken":
The fantastically-rendered videos are the work of London videographer Jim Clark. He does a great job making one's skin crawl by animating the videos in a way that's very believable. And creepy or not, his work is about the closest we can get to a post-mortem visit from our favorite bards. I leave you today with the poet that has my vote for "Most Likely to Return from the Dead": Edgar Allen Poe. After watching, be sure to head over to YouTube for the rest of the collection!
This channel is complete with over four hundred videos of what appear to be classic portraits of poets paired with mock-recordings of their voices. The catch is, when you hit play the portraits begin to move as if they themselves were reciting. The result is very cool for poetry buffs, but a bit creepy. Here's an example of Emily Dickinson "reading" I Cannot Live with You:
Doesn't it seem a little like these poets have come back from the dead in these videos? Faces and voices that in the past we could only imagine now appear before us, reading poems that we know intimately. It's probably a little like the feeling our grandparents got when they saw Jack Benny on television for the first time, rather than the radio. A particularly eerie one is seeing and hearing Robert Frost read the nearly ubiquitous "Road Not Taken":
The fantastically-rendered videos are the work of London videographer Jim Clark. He does a great job making one's skin crawl by animating the videos in a way that's very believable. And creepy or not, his work is about the closest we can get to a post-mortem visit from our favorite bards. I leave you today with the poet that has my vote for "Most Likely to Return from the Dead": Edgar Allen Poe. After watching, be sure to head over to YouTube for the rest of the collection!
VisualPoetry Combines Graphic Design and Poetic Verse
Maria Popova's article over at Brain Pickings made me aware of the Poetry on the Road literary festival which was held this past June in Bremen, Germany. As Popova points out, every year this international festival commissions visual artist Boris Müller to create a graphic representation of the festival's poetic theme. This project is known as VisualPoetry, and has evolved significantly over the years. Here is this year's design; the thickness of the lines represents the frequency of certain words in the poems. Make sure you click the image on the main site for the full effect.
These examples of visualizing poet's words got me thinking about the long tradition of representing poetic verse in some form of visual art. Usually this takes the form of illustration, but some illustrations are so vivid that they can stand as art on their own merits. Gustave Doré, the 18th century engraver, produced some of the most famous illustrations to poetry ever made. His subjects included Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Poe's "The Raven", and even the Bible. Even though they're in black and white, his engravings crackle with a life and energy that capture and extend his poetic subject. Perhaps my favorite of Doré's illustrations is his portrait of Milton's Satan in agony. The contrast of dark and light really captures the internal struggle of this moment in the epic:
Doré's prints are an early example of what Müller is doing in a [much more contemporary] way for the Poetry on the Road festival. Both artists have provided us with stunning new ways to think about poetry, and have, in the process, created legitimate, beautiful stand-alone art.
Doré's prints are an early example of what Müller is doing in a [much more contemporary] way for the Poetry on the Road festival. Both artists have provided us with stunning new ways to think about poetry, and have, in the process, created legitimate, beautiful stand-alone art.
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