Knife-handed babies from a demon woman’s nipples

It’s true. “Inferno” is now a video game, with a brawny, armor-clad Dante as its protagonist. Like a fallen soul, it is facing some stern judgments, both from prospective players and Dante scholars who wonder why a classic work of Western literature needed updating at all.  (from Dave Itzkoff’s article in the New York Times: article here)

Part of our aim with Cellpoems is to distribute verse in a way congruent with peoples’ routines. In other words, we’re all about accessibility, and this video game, while for the most part eschewing the actual text and thus the joys of language, will, I am certain, engage people so heavily in the narrative of the Divine Comedy that gameplayers might just read the accompanying digital version of Longfellow’s translation. (It’s too bad they couldn’t use Robert Pinsky’s incredible verse translation issued by FSG in 1994.)

As for the game, it seems pretty violent: it features knife-handed babies coming out of a Barbarella-esque demon woman’s nipples (Cleopatra, in Level 2, Canto 5.)

Here’s the trailer for the game, an ad to air during this Sunday’s superbowl:

I doubt the video game approaches the sin of lust with anywhere near the nuance of Dante, who seems to assess the severity of sin based on just how misguided it was.

But, I think I think EA’s video game is an incredibly good thing for poetry–did Jane Campion’s subtle Bright Star do anything but garner more readers for Keats?–and I’d like to see more of this.

I want to play video games of the following poems:

1.  The Prelude, by William Wordsworth

Gameplay: You walk as slowly as possible while jumbling a great amount of iambic pentameter in your head.

Obstacles: Childhood, steep ascents, the Alps.

Rewards: Peace and solitude, solace in knowledge gained

* The game is finished when the player’s mind is a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells. Fifty years later, he repeats the entire game but this time saying his prayers to God the whole while through.

2. “The Blue Booby,” by James Tate
Gameplay: First person flight above and throughout the Galapagos islands.

Obstacles: Giant tortoises snapping at you, hungry diamond-toothed sharks, other blue boobies, ornithologists

Rewards: At the end of the game, when you as the dandy bird you are have brought enough blue pieces of trash to your birdmate, you get to make dark and graphic crepuscular birdlove.

3.  Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by John Ashbery

Gameplay: You must move as little as possible. This is what the portrait says.

Obstacles: There is in that gaze a combination of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful in its restraint that you cannot look for long.

Reward: You look through the wrong end of a telescope as you fall back at a speed faster than that of light to flatten ultimately among the features of a room.

What poems do you want to play as video games?

–Chris