First, watch this video (maybe turn the sound off):

This video is noteworthy for two reasons. The first is Dame Edith Sitwell’s playful childlike rhythms, which come fast and don’t stick around. Personally, I find the reading and music a little annoying, but to each his own.

The important thing is the way the poem is presented. The technique of overlaying multiple words in the same space as a form of animation is something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot, although I didn’t stumble upon this video until today. I’ve been doing experiments with this technique in flash and have found myself able to read up to 700 words per minute without losing comprehension.

There is one dogmatic belief that a poem is all in the performance and another that it’s all on the page. With this technique, you have no permanent product on the page and a completely impersonal performance from a machine that has no respect for line breaks, pauses, or gravitas.

You start with an empty plane and end with an empty plane and the helpless reader is forced to focus on keeping up with the text rather than analyzing and interpreting each line. I find incessant interpretation completely dreadful, so another advantage of this device is that it doesn’t let formal readings get in the way of poetry as a spontaneous act. It breaks even the most persistent filters.

Another amazing advantage of this form is that it is based in animation. So you can have a justifiable reason for putting it on video sharing sites, projectors and several other mediums previously unavailable to poetry. This week I’ll get around to putting up one of my test Flash animations so you can see what I mean.