My Mistress' Eyes (Kinetic Shakespeare)

I've recently been learning how to create kinetic typography using Adobe CS5 After Effects (see this video of my wife singing "Mad World," for example). Today, I thought I'd apply these tools to one of Shakespeare's more famous sonnets, #130. Shakespeare was imitating yet defying the Petrarchan tradition. Maybe that's what I'm doing with the Shakespearean tradition. What do you think?




Sonnet 130
by William Shakespeare


My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks; 
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
   As any she belied with false compare. 

unholy sonnet

Here's something new. I've remixed the form of my sonnet, putting it into a Prezi presentation. If you haven't heard of Prezi, it is an amazing zoomable presentation tool that puts PowerPoint to shame. I don't know how much its artistic possibilities have been exploited, but this is a shot at rethinking an old form within a new one. I've made a movie out of the Prezi, which you can play, or you can click here to go to the Prezi presentation itself, which you can click through at your leisure (sequentially or not). You can also copy and remix the presentation for your own purposes if you wish. All in the spirit of remix culture!  Anyway, I'd love feedback from anyone on how this works. How does experiencing the sonnet in these different forms change its feel, its effect?





unholy sonnet
by Gideon Burton

to try to trace this rivering desire
to face this shivering of fire and ache
this trembling to require a bloodied blade
a muddied, scabbed, persistence of desire

oppresses me it presses me a shade
of wanting haunting me with buried fire
a darkly embered orange smoke a choir
and chorus, coarsely chanting sooty fate

I taste I waste a prey of praying's grace
unwieldy, not so wholly holy, ghost
and knotted flesh compounding tears and time

and time again to groan toward his face
with blinking stutttered broken breaking hopes
I claw the bread I claim the spilling wine

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. (This goes for the Prezi presentation, too!)