This post anticipates my presentation on Thursday. I've embedded a couple YouTube videos of 21st century (re)productions of some of Blake's more popular poems from Songs of Experience, "A Poison Tree" and "The Tyger." I've also posted a few annotated links to other video versions which I encourage you to check out. My presentation will consist of a layman's exposition of Blake's methods of material production (taken pretty much exclusively from Joseph Viscomi's Blake and the Idea of the Book) and then I want to compare and contrast this material production with a) Blake's critical idea of genius b) its avocation by 19th century poets and c) 21st century reproductions of Blake's works courtesy YouTube.
I want to argue that the 19th century interpretation of Blake as individual genius--a view arguably espoused by Blake himself, critically inscribed by Northrop Frye & Geoffrey Keynes and kept alive in every English class I've attended--is a paradigm which misses (or is continually eroded by) the fragmented nature of print production and literary/cultural canonization which he have hypothesized in class.
The canonization of Blake has fixed three things in place: his poems, his illustrations, and his persona: all of which happily assert the genius author-function of Blake (I'd be interested in counters to this Foucauldian reading via au courant network-theory). A 21st century YouTube reproduction of "Blake" is so-called, usually, because it borrows the words of a Blake poem and reproduces them in new (or at least, different) contexts of music/recitation and video. This reproduction seems a very un-Blakeian thing to do (as does his pedagogical canonization, for that matter) since imitation and reproduction are more aligned with neo-classicism than they are individual genius. Yet it is also a very post-modern thing to do, and a very popular thing to do, and, in terms of the emphasis of material production & visual art evidenced in these videos, perhaps a paradoxically Blakeian thing to do as well (?).
Enjoy the videos...
First, a folk version of "A Poison Tree" set to stock footage of carnivorous plants eating insects.
Other musical renditions of "A Poison Tree..."
Metal version (the text's poem is re-arranged; its refrain is simply "poison tree... poison tree"): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLrbxT44Kqo
A Capella version (accompanied by photographs of an a capella group): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Se0ZgjHhGw
Next, Blake's "The Tyger" as a silent short film. This video most abandons the "canonized" aspects of Blake (only the title reproduces any of Blake's text), but its collage of puppetry, photography, and animation brings attention to its material production.
Other renditions of "The Tyger"
An improvisational group reproduces the poem. The notion of improvisation lends itself to innate genius... but does improvisational reproduction? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNIS-kRJ95w
A five year-old recites the poem also using puppetry, though in a far less elaborate fashion than the above... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxHcVrnEBoI
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