Just as we thought we’d seen every YouTube meme, every cat falling down a toilet, every famous pop song turned history lesson, we stumble across poetryanimations — a bizarre yet addictive series of famous poets “reading” their classics via quasi-animated archival photographs.

The project is the brainchild of London-based videographer sound recordist Jim Clark, who takes his work as seriously as someone with an endearingly quaint @hotmail email address would.

Bizarre as these audiovisually missynched ghosts may be, the description text on each video offers surprisingly rich information on the author, the specific poem and its historical context.

Whether poetryanimations are a budding meme remains to be seen, but they’re certainly a treat for lit geeks with a penchant for the quirky.