Poets and Other Drunks

I bet every poet is so AFRAID that people will be watching a horrible clip of him or her like this one after he or she is dead.

Admit it--wouldn't you run the other direction if you saw this pigeon...erm poet...coming your way?

I know I would.

How he natters on.

It was a great service by the interviewer (who has the patience of a boddhisatva) as I'm sure the mug in front of him never sat still for this long before.

He's okay on the page, but how insufferable he is.

I like some of his poems.

But they should stay on the page.

A mannered drunk with patrician pretensions and a wearying accent doesn't make a good interview.

The last few minutes feature a somewhat memorable poem, but even there note how the Achilles reference in the poem is an annoying attempt to place himself in the canon, even as a drunk-joker, trickster, whatever.

So Berryman got a little dicey and was admittedly funny at times.

But if we're gonna read drunks, give me one with panache. Like Anne Sexton.

Okay, I'll stop picking on the dead now.

Sorry, Mr. Berryman.

You wuz alright.



Jim Clark's PoetryAnimations (on YouTube) fascinate me.

They are a fascinating take on ventriloquism of the dead. Necriloquism?

They hint at how every "reading" of a poem is a work of artifice and an unnatural act to some degree.

They reverence and they mock gently at the same time. Perhaps this acts as a stopgap for the self-consciousness inherent in simply baldly admiring a poem's posture. We're not supposed to do that anymore. For some reason.

I think his clips should be broadcast on the sides of large glass buildings, like the Tokyo brontosaurus in Lost in Translation.