A New Stage for Poets

I always imagined the voice of Arthur Rimbaud, a french poet from the 19th century filled with sarcasm. You can’t expect someone who wrote “Ass Hole Sonnet” to take life too seriously. Especially given that the goal of Rimbaud and the famous Decadent Movement was to take the air out of the pompous poetry world that ruled Paris back then. He died at the Age of 27, maybe the first “Rock n roll” heroes that died at this cursed age, but during his life he managed to drink a lot, smoke whatever he could lay his hands on, get shot by a gun owned by his male lover, and accomplish a book called A Season in Hell. The eternal child of French poetry should have had a voice at least as throaty and poisonous as Kurt Cobain.

A channel working on YouTube for some time now dissipate this fantasy. With the wonders of technology the site animates one of Rimbaud pictures, adding to it narration, and made the dead come to life and read his songs. His voice has none of the storm that forms his biography. Rimbaud has a sweet voice, amazingly melodic, and the tone of his readings is sweet as honey. Its hard to say who is right, the listener, who was expecting to hear a “dirty Rimbaud”, or the channel creator, who thought of Rimbaud as the feminine version of Ricky Martin (if there is one).

The debate heightens when the animated painting of Walt Whitman, the U.S national poet, is played. After all, it is hard not to hear the pathos in the words “O Captain! My Captain!”, but with the animated version you can almost see the teleprompter. But then you suddenly realize that there is another version of the poem, and in the other version has the same lecturing tone that comes from his writings. Oscar Wild also gets narration that match his image, but come on, how hard is it to copy a British drama queen?

All the poets that appear on the site, narrated in many languages, have left the world. So much that the english poet James Shirley, who died in 1666, did not get his own picture and had to do with a skull. Maybe thats why there is electronic music playing at the background. The rest of the poets are all there, Budler, Lord Byron, Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and even wonderful Renaissance oldies like Dante. Hunter S. Thompson is probably the youngest of the animated poets, probably thats why it was not difficult to create a pretty accurate narration, the segment from “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” , and surprisingly, Thompson narrates himself just as good as Johnny Depp.

The main question that rises from watching the clips is if this is not a violent rubbery of the reading experience? Is it not another nail in the coffin of the written word, where the mortician is played by animation? Well, there is base for such fear. Afterall, literature and poetry try to exists within a void empty of external effects except for text. A sterile environment that arouse the imagination to break free and fly beyond the walls of reality that surround it. But, the feeling is that the aim of the creators, especially based on the investment in the site, was to praise poetry and poets, a creation that rose from the admiration of the written word. That is why, maybe, this site simply opens the gate to the written word, just like the smell of a good old book.