The Shape Poem
In
a shape poem, a poet uses the lines of his text to form the silhouette of an
identifiable visual image – generally, an image that represents or comments
upon the subject of the poem.
The
shape poem goes back to Greek Alexandria of the third century B.C., when poems
were written to be presented on objects such as an ax handle, a statue’s wings,
an altar – even an egg. English poet George Herbert (1593-1633) led an
Elizabethan movement using shape poems strictly for the page: two examples are
“Easter Wings” and “The Altar,” written in the shape of, yes, wings and an
altar. Lewis Carroll toyed with the notion in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, presenting “The Mouse’s Tale” in
the shape of a mouse’s tail. The form continued into the 20th century
through the typographical experiments of F.T. Marinetti and his anarchistic
Futurism movement, Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1918 Calligrammes collection, the playful tinkering of e.e. cummings,
the Chinese ideograms used by Ezra Pound, and various works by members of the
Dadaist movement.
In
the 1950s, a group of Brazilian poets led by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and
Augusto de Campos sought to fully integrate the dual role of words as carriers
of language and visual art. Using a phrase coined by European artists Max Bill
and Öyvind Fahlström, the Brazilian group declared themselves the “concrete
poetry” movement. In 1958, they issued a fiery manifesto lamenting the use of
“words as mere indifferent vehicles, without life, without personality, without
history, taboo-tombs in which convention insists on burying the idea.”
Concrete
poetry was originally aimed at using words in an abstract manner, without an
allusion to identifiable shapes. But as the movement reached the height of its
popularity in the 1960s, it became less abstract and was adopted by
conventional poets as a specific poetic form rather than a full visual/literary
fusion. Many of them returned to the shape-based forms popular in the third
century B.C.
Among
the best of the ‘60s shape poets was John Hollander, who created his works with
a typewriter. As a scholar, editor and accomplished poet – working in many
different forms – Hollander also provided a thorough explication of the process
in his 1969 collection Types of Shape.
Hollander described his process in a 2003 interview with the St. John’s University Humanities Review:
“I
would think of the representation of some object in silhouette – a silhouette
which wouldn’t have any holes in it – and then draw the outlines, fill in the
outlines with typewriter type … and then contemplate the resulting image for
anywhere from an hour to several months. The number of characters per line of
typing would then give me a metrical form for the lines of verse, not syllabic
but graphematic (as a linguist might put it). These numbers, plus the number of
incidents from flush left, determined the form of each line of the poem.”
In
Hollander’s 1969 “Swan and Shadow,” he uses the text to create the silhouette
of a swan, the surface of a lake and the swan’s upside-down shadow. Hollander
relates the words of the poem to their physical location within the image. (The
swan’s head, for example, describes “Dusk / Above the / water…”).
“One
certainly needs no artistic talent in order to draw a good bit, and certainly
not to rough out a silhouette,” Hollander says. “It’s not a lack of talent, but
an absolutely dreadful educational system that prevents everyone from being
able to draw a little.”
Making the Poem
Through
laborious trial-and-error experiments, I’ve devised a process for creating a
shape poem, with two inherent biases. First, my process gives precedence to
preserving the integrity of the original poem, applying the visual image
afterward. Second, my process takes advantage of two modern advances: the image
reduction/enlargement capabilities of today’s copiers, and the convenience
offered by computer word-processing programs.
Write a Poem. Try free verse or prose forms.
Imagine a Shape. It doesn’t have to reflect the primary subject of the
poem. Sometimes it’s more effective to choose a shape that reflects a small
detail or provides a subtle comment on the discourse.
Find an Image. In addition to the Internet, you might try magazines,
photo books, children’s coloring books or craft stores.
Get the Right Size. Run the lines of your poem together, inserting
punctuation as needed, and print it out as a single prose paragraph. Compare
the area taken up by your poem and that provided by your image. Use a copy
machine to reduce or enlarge the image accordingly.
Cut and Paste. Cut your poem into one-line strips and paste them
over your image with a glue stick, beginning each line at the left margin of
the image, and ending it at or slightly past the right margin. If you run out
of words before you run out of image – or vice versa – return to the copier,
adjust your image size and cut and paste again. This is the most arduous step,
but it’ll make the final two steps much easier.
Head to Your Computer. Identify your most leftward line. Beginning at flush
left, type the entire line; then work your way upward and downward, using your
space bar to position each line’s first letter according to its relationship to
adjoining letters.
Edit. Once you’ve typed out the poem, you may want to adjust or change the
words to polish the silhouette.
Photo by MJV: "Return to Sender," a shape poem published by Terrain.org
No comments:
Post a Comment