visual poem

The authors' collaboration on this piece was prompted by a Letraset visual poem by Beaulieu, “Self-Quarantine.” While thinking of the crowded space of arrows in that poem, they worked to engage with Unicode (and in particular, the four arrows U-2196–U-2199) in ways inspired by Beaulieu’s engagement with Letraset. The resulting poem is more sparse visually at any particular moment, but quite constrained and tense. The boundary will fill in in unanticipated ways if one simply waits. Those who are very patient will see that the process slows down as more and more arrow-shadows stick to the “walls.” The constantly-moving arrow leaves a trace wherever it bounces, but, as a glyph, it has a different substance than the edge of the browser, and cannot encounter its own residue. For those who crave an interactive experience, the poem can be interactive: Resizing the browser is an intervention.

The visual poem shows in a graphical way what kind of metamorphoses take place in the text. The names can refer to different things each time because language is a mobile 'army of metaphors'.

(Source: Translation of the description in Literatuur Op Het Scherm)

Poetry, and the imagery found therein, has long been one of the foundations of literature across the globe. Our ability to decipher the imagery and symbols in poetic verse has long been a daunting and rewarding task for those individuals who enjoy reading and hearing verse. Bridle Your Tongue is an animated poem with a concentration on the power and longevity of destructive language. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)

This series of visual poems use an artistic writerly method developed by Tom Philips for his famous artist book, A Humument. Philips extracted a poetic narrative about a character named Toge— who showed up when the words “together” or “altogether” were present on a page of W. H. Mallock’s Victorian novel A Human Document. Poundstone uses this method to poetically and artistically deconstruct Ann Coulter’s writing, exposing some of the ideological content hidden in her inflammatory prose. The parallels between Mallock’s Victorian sensibilities and Coulter’s conservative insensibility are apparent when juxtaposed with this mash-up, suggesting that she is “a crazy self referential Victorian.” (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

As a programmable writing project, Letters from the Archiverse can be considered both a visual poem and an application. Its most current version was composed (and continues to be developed) with architectural modeling space software AutoCAD. Combining methods and techniques drawn from traditional lineages of concrete poetry and ―open-field‖ composition with 3D image modeling, the poem offers writers and viewers alike the opportunity to engage in the materiality of screen-based writing, while exploring new directions and theories in visual language art. In the current phase of the project, readers are able to explore and manipulate the poem on the iPad, using a commercial architectural drafting app.

Our demo of the app will emphasize the Archiverse project as a working model as well as a critical interrogation of the general future of digital composition tools – in a manner not dissimilar to Microsoft Word’s current technological augmentation and extension of the typewriter. Within the Archiverse, writing re-emerges as a boundary-less, multidimensional, networked field, inviting the reader to assume a position of constant ―field‖ exploration. Here, she becomes something more than a mere text producer or consumer; she takes on the roles and responsibilities of a collaborator and co-creator of a vast multimedia, intertextual cosmos.

(Source: Authors' abstract from HASTAC 2013)