A month or so ago I was working on a text and image assignment for my video production/editing course and I chose to work with Bukowski's poem "Bluebird." Bukowski is one of my all-time favorite authors. I find that, like Hunter S. Thompson, people get distracted far too easy with the sensationalism of the author and forget that author's like Hunter and Buk produced some incredibly gorgeous text. When I first began reading Bukowski I was drawn to his novels and the brutality within. I don't know if I was drawn to them because I found something within the art or if I was pulled in due to growing up in a society where women are taught at birth that brutality is desirable (excuse the cultural studies mindset creeping out). Anyhow, now, while I still find "Ham on Rye" to be my favorite novels of Bukowski, I find much more in his poetry; especially those which he wrote later in his life. "Bluebird," in my opinion, is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful poems ever written. Even more so when the author is taken into account. For Bukowski, a man who was physically and verbally abusive to pretty much everyone near him, to write about the overwhelming need he feels to project a vision of masculinity that is deemed acceptable, fully aware that this "bird" inside of him is suffocating...it's beautiful. I definitely recommend looking the poem up online and if you like it, check out The Last Night of the Earth. It is the poetry book that "Bluebird" appears in and it has many amazing poems that reveal an aging man who worried about leaving his wife and cats to deal with his body after he died.
Anyway. My point of this is to share a video that I found while I was hunting for a clear and effective reading of the poem for the video I was making (which turned out amazingly well). I don't know who made the video but I loved it and thought it was really well done.
No comments:
Post a Comment