Category: 1.3

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.

THE TIDE RISES, THE TIDE FALLS

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 
The tide rises, the tide falls
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls; 
Along the sea-sands damp and brown 
The traveller hastens toward the town, 
      And the tide rises, the tide falls. 

Darkness settles on roofs and walls, 
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls; 
The little waves, with their soft, white hands, 
Efface the footprints in the sands, 
      And the tide rises, the tide falls. 

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls 
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls; 
The day returns, but nevermore 
Returns the traveller to the shore, 
      And the tide rises, the tide falls. 

For the third brief, I have chosen to work with a piece of poetry. The first thing I did with my poem was focus on personal thoughts and translation. Before starting the project, I didn’t know the poem, but it raised feelings and emotions the first time I read it. Some of them were probably the author’s intentions, but poetry always keeps space for a reader and their own opinions. I captured my own interpretation of the text.

The idea of my first experiment was to visualise the chosen piece of poetry using the letters and words of the poem, placing them into shapes to create a picture that translates the meaning of the poem, creating a piece of concrete poetry. First, I played around with simple shapes and then tried to create a whole complex picture that represents the meaning and my observations about the poem.

The second experiment was about visually translating the poem through a new language placed on the grid. This translation uses a new system of an alphabet, exchanging letters for positions on the grid supported by using dots, symbols, lines etc., creating diagrams/graphs like visualisations. I ended up with a visualised translation of the whole poem. However, after finishing this experiment, I knew that was not the right way to go, as it leaned away from the whole meaning of the poem.

In the third experiment, I focused on a moving image and a way to transfer my poem into an animation. The animated sketches in the video below are exploring the text being translated into a moving image. It is based on the narrative of the text, on the cycle of the tide, life and death, the darkness and light, but also my own understanding and feelings.