After recently discovering a virtual library of famous dead people reciting their classic works on the web, I see now that Levi's has taken a literary tack in its new ad campaign across the USA. It's a stretch but if it spawns a new generation of poetry enthusiasts it can't hurt. The Go Forth ads claim to appeal to the 'smarts and heritage' of the American people and feature dubbed audio of Walt Whitman reciting his famous poem Oh Pioneers!You can check out the ads here and here. Makes me wonder what the Australian market might stomach? The Banjo pushing Bega Cheese...? Perhaps a bit of Dorothea MacKellar selling sunscreen...? I reckon A.D. Hope could have been put to great creative exposure in the recent federal election campaign. Would have made it worth listening to anyway - and we might have even gotten a winner.
After stumbling across Bono reading Bukowski online recently, I had a look around for other luminaries reciting classic poems on the net. And guess what I found? Through the magic of technology, a host of greats have been resurrected to read to camera their celebrated works. Blake, Frost, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson - the list goes on. Not sure that technology has quite mastered the masters yet (Walt's crazy eyebrow appears to have a life of its own...) but it's a bit of a giggle to think that Mr Whitman might have delivered his bold and noble poem O Captain! My Captain! a little something like this:
This morning I woke up singing the body electric in my head. 'I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul...' J'adore Walt Whitman. '...and if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?' I'm hoping this is a sign that while I'm sleeping, my unconscious continues to slowly untangle my story and and issue it forth. Last night I was contemplating how the expression of the inner mind can be written with subtlety and grace and insight and understatement, so that the reader who reads the lines on the page is satisfied with what they take from the story, while the reader who sees beyond the text finds a richness there, greater than they expected, which pleases them. So I keep reading Whitman because I'm sure there's an answer in there somewhere...
