Poetry, dude
NEW MEDIA and ancient media are hooking up. mtvU, the 24-hour network that broadcasts on college campuses, has chosen John Ashbery, a Pulitzer Prize winner, to be its poet laureate. His poems will be featured on broadcast spots that also direct students to the mtvU website, where there are more poems.
Cool (as oldsters might say). This could be a useful bridge between the young and the middle-aged, a kind of literary archeological quest in which college students dig fresh insights from the printed world of poems.
On television and on the Web, mtvU gives the poems new life, making them into videos. Sounding like rasping rainfall, the letters fall into place to form the words of a verse, then rush off the screen.
Producers at mtvU struggled with how to make the spots work. Adding music or pictures could have compromised the poems' integrity, explains Stephen Friedman, mtvU's general manager. Instead, the videos capitalize on the poems' content and on their relative quiet amid the station's music programming.
There's the first verse of "My Philosophy of Life," a kind of college anthem:
"Just when I thought there wasn't room enough for another thought in my head, I had this great idea -- call it a philosophy of life, if you will. Briefly, it involved living the way philosophers live, according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?" Those who want a more conventional read, can find the full poems on the website.
Also on mtvU's Web page is a link to a 2005 Slate article called "The Instruction Manual: How to Read John Ashbery." The upshot: One doesn't have to understand Ashbery's poetry so much as experience it, which has a ring of the universal permission that poetry can grant. Why stick to the daily grind of being comprehensible when one can be lived?
Friedman says a new poet laureate will be chosen each year. It might be an icon such as Ashbery or a musician who writes lyrics.
The station will also cosponsor a contest for college students with the National Poetry Series, which promotes poetry volumes for publication. The winner will be chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa, another Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. The manuscript Komunyakaa chooses will be published next year.
What the poet laureate program and other mtvU projects show is how old culture can have a new media life, retaining its values while expanding into new venues.
Baby boomers can worry a little less: All culture is not being lost in the iPod era.
