Barack Obama’s Poem Now a Video
Last March, we posted about two poems the youthful Barack Obama published in the Occidental College literary magazine in 1981:
The poems are “Pop,” a portrait of his maternal grandfather, and “Underground,” a naturalistic description of “apes / That eat figs” in subterranean water grottoes. A couple of months after the two poems came to light, The New Yorker asked prominent critic and professor Harold Bloom his opinion of them: Bloom pronounced “Underground” the better of the two poems: “It gave me the oddest feeling that he might have been reading the poems of D. H. Lawrence—it reminded me of the poem ‘Snake’.... I think it is about some sense of chthonic forces, just as Lawrence frequently is—some sense, not wholly articulated, of something below, trying to break through.”Now the Blue Rose Arts Collective has transformed “Underground” into a poetry video on YouTube, combining footage of Japanese snow monkeys with Indonesian music by the Nyoman Jayus Bamboo Ensemble. I wonder what Obama thinks of their treatment of his poem. What do you think of it, as a poem and as a film? Come back after you’ve looked at the video and post your comments below.
More poetry videos:
A newly discovered cache of poetry video shorts
Poetry Everywhere Videos All Over the Place
Fun with Poetry Cartoons
Wordsworth’s Daffodils Spring Up on YouTube
“Fragile” — Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65 is a poetry film single
Our library of links to video poetry
Comments
An interesting combination of music, video and poetry, although the video and captions distracted me from each in turn. Even so, using music and video lifts the poem into a new dimension. There was a better fit between music and film than between film and poem, I think. But I like the concept.
Carol