Before diving into further experimenting, I did a little brainstorming over goals and things I would like to achieve through the final version of the project.
I was thinking about the way how to allow the reader to engage with the concrete poetry in a different way than usual. (Usually in printed or digital form)
- I wanted to change the flat narrative of the picture I created.
- I wanted to explore the possibilities of using both digital form and physical materials and keeping the “traditional and noble” character of the poem, yet translating it into something new and “different” to meet the brief.
- I noticed that the meaning of the poem is quite unclear at the beginning, and the reader gets the idea of life and death, the cycle of life and nature’s meaning later in the poem. I felt like that was an interesting find that could also be presented in the project.
I sorted the poem by its rhymes and created a different piece of the concrete poetry for each of those parts. I combined a slightly abstract form with a more literal form to create a set of 9 pictures that can be layered into 1 picture. I wanted to mainly focus on a visual interpretation of the poem. The pictures try to visually represent the meaning of the poem – both literate and poetic, but also the emotions and feelings connected to the poem.
For the final outcome, I tried to create something that a viewer can engage with and think about. First, I tried to create a simple video (at the end of this article) by putting the 9 concrete poetry pieces next to each other and layering them onto each other. The layering was interesting to me, but I wanted to create something different from regular concrete poetry or the way people engage with poetry. Something that keeps the idea of the at-first hidden meaning and clarity of the poem. But also translates the poem into something new. That’s how a PROTOTYPE of my little transparent poetry book came to life.
