Poetry 1

" There is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness. "

 

 

1.  The commercial for Levi's borrows the poem called The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski.

 

2. In this commercial I find it ironic that they use the line "your life is your life" meaning you can make your OWN choices, but this is advertising a product, they're not directly telling you to buy the product, but they sure are showing a lot of peoples jeans.. So I guess "subconsciously" they're telling you to buy the product.

 

3. I think the poem reflects the reputation of his work. He is known for "relying on experience, emotion, and imagination.." When he talks of light, not a lot but its there and it beats darkness it makes me think if its someone how connected to the alcohol, the abuse, or the Great Depression, Charles still sounds hopeful. These connections with light and dark demonstrate his imagination on how to present this to us, his emotion present in the writing and the experience he connects the poem to.

 

4. To find the answers to question 1 I typed in a few lines of the video into the search followed by Levi's commercial, then the name of the poem and author comes up in this link:

 http://www.gosee.de/news/film/levi-s-your-life-is-your-life-there-is-light-somewhere-die-ersten-globalen-werbespots-sorgen-fuer-aufruhr-11586?gos_lang=en#.Ugq-Mqbn-1s

To find the answer to question 3, I looked up a biography of Charles Bukowski to find out some information about, I was able to see that he had problems with his father, alcohol and the love of his life dying to alcohol consumption, or him experiencing the Great Depression. Next I looked up his typical style for his works I found he relied on experience, imagination, and emotion which was present in his work The Laughing Heart.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001977/bio

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/charles-bukowski