Wrapping My Head Around Poetic Media

After viewing all of the videos left behind for this assignment, I was happy that I gained a lot of great perspectives of different ways in which poetry can be performed. I was an especially big fan of some of the more creative and outgoing examples, like Edgar Allen Poe in the Simpsons or  John Masefield's "Sea Fever" in Star Trek. There were a broad variety of topics discussed, and in this post I hope to break down and discuss some of my favorites.

One of the things mentioned in this post was how to portray a sense of professionalism with your posts. We see one example that is clearly amateur, which we can tell just by the grainy quality and lack of proper lighting. An example of a good amateur video and poetry reading can be seen in the video "Kairos" where a single lady with quality footage and good lighting reads an insightful poem that is successful even though it is not professionally done. What I took from this is that even if you don't have a professional camera crew, it is still possible to create your own inspiring videos and to express your creativity to others through poetry in a way that does not come of as poor quality or extremely "amateur."

Slam Poetry and musical adaptations of poetry both stuck out to me in the same ways. I saw them as being a lot like going to a concert. As a big fan of music, I have attended quite a few concerts, and I got the same kind of vibe while watching these videos. They are obviously meant to entertain, although I think there's a difference in the slam poetry performances, as these tend to include more elements of humor, I especially liked the scene from, "So I Married an Axe Murderer." Where he talks about the woman stealing his heart and his cat, it just had a very informal, light feel to it, which is a side of poetry I don't think a lot of people see if they don't have a lot of exposure to it. They see it more as the videos at the beginning, where the people are all tense and serious while quoting Shakespeare and trying to get people to fall in love with them.

Most of the videos at the end seemed to share similarities in that they were about sharing poetry in different video formats, and included everything from 3D to rotating swirls of texts, with beats in the background. These were all a little strange for me at first, and I personally haven't seen a lot of poetry shown in this kind of format. Despite that I thought it was still creative, and I think that there is certainly an audience for it, as the extra effects give the video personality, and the words are no longer just words, but rather images that can speak for themselves as well, giving the poem a second voice.