Today in poetry corner we are featuring a nineteenth century Irish poem about wee men, by William Allingham, called "The Faeries". It's about little faerie men! But it's kind of a classic dark fairy tale, so those of you troubled by such creepy themes of children in peril and people tormented for digging up thorn bushes may want to steer clear today.
Though I was not specifically familiar with this poem, its influence courses through some of my favorite more contemporary fantasy. It can be found lurking fiercely in the best work of Terry Pratchett, and is referenced in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". This is surely why so much of the poem was so wildly familiar to me.
It is set to music by it's own glorious internal rhythms, by AI and, well, by me through all manner of editing. But mostly it sounds an awful lot like it's written and performed by The Band. In that guise, it gets frankly uncanny at times, particularly when Richard Manuel Robot sings. The images are a barrage of something a bit like moving photographs, which speaks to the current level of AI video. As to the quality of things syncing up nicely in the video, it is, mmmm, erratic, which speaks to my refusal to spend any more of what was probably already too many hours fiddling with this.
Also, for reasons related to this above, and to my limitations with these tools, we also lost a verse from this poem about the king who is old and gray and losing his wits.
Once again I am astonished by what AI music can do at this point, but AI video isn't quite all there yet, and nearly always comes, as you will see, in rough, tiny clips. For those interested though, there are demonstrations of work in progress on AI video that suggest brilliant new astonishments are not far off.
I have probably at this point 15 other poetry songs collected, but none are likely to be suited to this approach, and I am not sure I would like to take this route again. So if there is another poetry music video it will likely be as different from this as was this from my Emily Dickinson video.
I do hope you'll enjoy it.
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