Did you find Elizabeth Alexander's poem for the presidential inauguration "too prosy"? A disappointment?
Then perhaps you'd prefer one of the 51 remixes which were sent in to a New Jersey radio station following a request by DJ Kenny G: "By all accounts, Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem, uh, sucked. We think you could do better," he wrote on his blog. "So, here's the deal. Take her poem. Remix it, shred it, speed it up, slow it down, reconstruct it, deconstruct it, warp it, bend it, twist it, scream it, rock it, set it to noise, obliterate it. You get the idea."
I particularly like number 15 - scroll down to see all the remixes - which puts the words of the poem in alphabetical order: "About about about about air, all all ancestors, and any any thing begin begun better beyond boom box bramble". It's spookily compelling.
Number nine, the "heavy metal" version, is absolutely terrifying (I'm sitting at home on my own and could only listen to 20 seconds of it). Others chop and change the words to come up with entirely different poems; number 47 puts it to the Twin Peaks theme music, which works rather well.
Have a listen and let me know what you think. Do you prefer the original? Is there, as the LA Times suggests, "something - poetic? - in people creatively engaging with a poem to give it more zing"? Or is it sacrilege to interfere with a poet's words?
