The Wordsworth Sibling's Remix

The idea of Remix is to split and recreate into a new medium or idea while still containing pieces of the original. This may be a new topic but it has occurred several times throughout the ages. Literature becomes film, poetry into music, and in the case of the Wordsworth siblings, journals to poetry. This is an interesting topic on itself, to recreate something in an almost Frankenstein’s monster or a collage of clippings from various pieces of art or work. With the “Grasmere Journals” and “I wondered Lonely as a Cloud”, it becomes an even more interesting case. Here are only a few lines that are the same yet you can still see the same image. This is because of the use of similar imagery and words to create an image of dancing dandelions by a lake. This creates an interesting case of remix that differs from most of its kind. The best way to define this form of remix comes from two definitions that are mashed together to form their own sort of remix. In Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence” where it is defined as a phenomenon where we, as humans, inspire each other so we take bits and pieces, just small ones. Its evidence in the word choice and imagery that inspiration exist. Through both, the daffodils are described to dance, to be happy in their movements, and both authors feel happy afterword. The difference is the exact word choice. This pushes it from most sense of remix. The other definition that can be used to describe this situation is of “Genre Play” presented by Dustin W. Edwards in “Framing Remix Rhetorically: Toward a typology of Transformative Work”. In this article, he describes the transfer of something from one medium to the next so from journal to poetry. For most cases, this would mean that that the main theme of remix would still be visible, large pieces of the original text still visible only scattered throughout. The remix situation doesn’t fit either category entirely but still takes from both to define itself and that makes it so different from other ideas. It is the example of how we are inspired from others and “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.” (Lethem 60).