By Katie Haegele
Don't get me wrong: I love ink and pulp, journals and 'zines,
secondhand bookstores and the smell of a library. But digital literature, that
just keeps surprising me.
In fact, it was a piece of digital poetry that taught me there are more
than 13 ways of looking at a blackbird.
Edward Picot is an English writer and critic who, this month, completed
13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (www.edwardpicot.com/blackbird), a
collection of animated pieces inspired by the Wallace Stevens poem of
the same name. The original poem is broken into 13 short stanzas;
likewise, Picot's project consists of 13 individual Flash animations. His very
short films bring to life - new life - Stevens' startling images, such
as "barbaric glass" and "the bawds of euphony. "
Picot is also a fiction writer, and in 2000, he decided to put some of
his work online. What began as a cheaper alternative to print
self-publishing became an interest in the literary possibilities of the new
medium, and he started writing nonlinear fiction. He told me that he views
digital poetry as a natural extension of 20th-century experimental
poetry.
Picot said that "many of the ideas of concrete poetry" - in which the
shape of the typography on the printed page is an element of the poem -
"have been picked up by hyperliterature. Instead of having a poem about
a bird which is shaped like a bird, you can have a poem about a bird
which is shaped like a bird and moves across the page like a bird. "
Picot's Web site (www.edwardpicot.com) is home to the Hyperliterature
Exchange, which offers links and criticism of digital literature, his
own original pieces, and the Blackbirds sequence. He says that to be
successful, visual "interpretations" of poems must be original pieces of
art in their own right.
"If you're going to be literal-minded, then you'll never get anywhere.
You have to remake it as something new. I suppose the paradigms would
be something like Verdi making an opera out of Falstaff, or Tchaikovsky
making one out of Eugene Onegin, or Hitchcock making a film out of
Rebecca or even Walt Disney's Fantasia. Not slavish translations of
existing works of art, but new works of art which use the old ones as
jumping-off points. "
Or as the Sundance Channel would have it: action poetry!
Last year, the independent-film channel commissioned animators to
create shorts based on poems by Billy Collins. The resulting Action Poetry
Series (www.bcactionpoet.org) consists of 11 short films, each narrated
by Collins, who recites his poems in a deadpan that reminds me of Kevin
Spacey's eternally amused voice-over in American Beauty.
The animated films for three of the poems - "Some Days," "Budapest" and
"Forgetfulness" - were made by Julian Grey, director and partner of
Head Gear Animation in Toronto (www.headgearanimation.com). Head Gear
makes stop-motion animation, Claymation, mixed media and live-action films
for commercial and broadcast clients, such as MTV and Kellogg's.
I talked to Grey about his films, which are dark, witty, and clever,
like the poems themselves. Although he wasn't familiar with the poems he
chose beforehand, he was already acclimated to the idea of taking
another person's concept and making it visual.
"As a commercial director, I am often engaged in interpretation of
ideas and brands, translating concepts into a visual medium that can engage
the viewer," he explained.
In the poem "Budapest," Collins describes a writer scribbling, his pen
"intent as any forager with nothing on its mind but the grubs and
insects that will allow it to live another day. " For his piece, Grey shot
an actor's hand frame by frame, then added wiggly little creatures
resembling pen doodles in cel animation. The result is a film about a writer
who literally makes things come to life.
If that's not a good metaphor for literature, both on the page and on
the screen, I don't know what is.
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