"Rilke and the Archaic Torso", by Edward Picot

"How does Rilke get from his admiration of the statue to his closing phrase - 'Du must dein Leben andern' ('You must change your life')? Why should a marble torso, however magnificent, seem to be sending him (and us) such a powerful challenge?"

Taking Rilke's famous poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" as his starting-point, Edward Picot's new work of hyperliterature provides first a commentary on the poem, then an undercommentary, and finally a poetic response of his own, animated in Flash, with hurtling fragments of Greek statuary.

The New Media artist and writer Millie Niss has just opened up her website (http://sporkworld.org) to work from guest artists, and Edward Picot is the first to appear there. "Rilke and the Archaic Torso" can be seen at http://sporkworld.org/guestartists/picot/index.html .

- Edward Picot
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange

Comments

, Jim Andrews

Hi Edward,

I liked having all those translations of the Rilke poem, to start it out. I have to read a poem at least five times anyway to start to understand it, so great to read four different translations instead.

Your commentary on it was to the point and useful not only about the poem but larger contexts involving Nietzsche, Shaw, Yates, Eliot etc, the 'theory' of the 'superman' in art, politics, and relations between Romanticism and Modernism. Also some interesting observations about the 'superman' in relation to the Darwinian.

Your "Undercommentary" and Flash piece broadened the context from a historical study to some sort of consideration of the place of that literary history and history of ideas in the contemporary and/or in your own view of things now. Instead of views on who we are and how history is shaped, the "Undercommentary" gives us a look at something of your history and wondering on your own identity. And the Flash piece puts the broken torso in interesting relation to Flash poetry, or 'disjunctive' contemporary poetry.

As a work of net art, it's quite humble, but that doesn't seem to be a detriment to it as a good piece of "hyperliterature". Nor did I get the sense that I'd rather have seen it be in print. I do get that sense, though, in a lot of hypertext that is unreadable for one reason or another on the screen. The Flash poem was a bit unreadable. That's actually the only part of the piece I didn't read a few times. But I guess I read it visually instead, in relation to the fragment, the torso, the disjunctive, the Superman and the Flash.

Thanks. I enjoyed it very much.

> "Rilke and the Archaic Torso"
> http://sporkworld.org/guestartists/picot/index.html

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