FREE, June 2-3 on
Amazon Kindle. The new collection from award-winning poet Michael J. Vaughn.
In the fall of 2007, Kara Gebhart Uhl and Maria Schneider,
my editors at Writer’s Digest, asked
me for a history piece on the shape poem – the idea of using a poem’s
typographical layout to represent an object or image referred to in the poem.
It seemed like a natural subject for me; I am a hobbyist painter, and have
always enjoyed using bits of text in my artworks. My curiosity was further piqued
when I discovered John Hollander’s majestic 1969 Swan and Shadow – and his book
Types of Shape – and then enjoyed a
brief correspondence with Hollander himself, then a professor emeritus at Yale.
In reading other shape poems, however, I came away largely
disappointed. Too many had clearly been written mainly to comment upon – and
fill the contours of – their chosen shapes. The poem was serving the needs of
the shape, when it should be the other way around. With this in mind, I took
one of my free-verse poems – Papageno’s Complaint, inspired by the birdcatcher
character in Mozart’s Magic Flute –
and, using a primitive but satisfying cut-and-paste technique, reshaped it into
the form of a toucan. Later, after I used the positional relationships of the
words on the page to transfer the image to my computer (the “r” in line 3 just
over the “T” in line 4, and so on), I gazed at the Times New Roman bird perched
upon my screen and felt that I had created something magical.
In the following months, I became obsessed, spending hours in
the corner of a coffeehouse, running through glue sticks as I converted my
favorite poems into imagery. When I handed the work to friends, I got just the
reaction I wanted: a look of fascination at the idea that a poem could also be
a salamander, a ’65 Mustang or Frank Sinatra, followed by the eyes focusing in
on the words that might inspire such an intriguing silhouette.
Sadly, I could not find a press to deliver my work into book
form (although a couple were sorely tempted), and the poems sat in my files.
Then, in early 2015, I was reviewing the stats for my blog, Writerville
(Writerville.blogspot.com) and discovered that a cell-phone photo of my “bear”
poem, Consolation, posted upon its publication in the journal Terrain.org, had drawn ten times more
pageviews than the second post on the list. I realized that photos of the poems
would maintain the poems’ integrity in a Kindle ebook version, and I was off on
this project. I hope you enjoyed them. Thanks!
Michael J. Vaughn
Following is the Writer’s
Digest article that resulted from my assignment.
Concrete Poetry
from Writer’s Digest, March
13, 2008
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
indents 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.”
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 conveniences
offered by computer word-processing programs.
1.
Write a poem. Try free verse or prose forms. For this article, I used
“Papageno’s Complaint,” a free-verse poem I recently wrote. It was inspired by
the bird catcher in Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute.
2.
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. I chose the object of my
character’s occupation: a bird. Because Papageno is a catcher of exotic birds,
I settled on a toucan.
3.
Find an image. In addition to the Internet, you might try magazines, photo
books, children’s coloring books or craft stores. In my case, I found a photo
of a toucan at a zoo’s website.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6.
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. For the tip of the beak, “down,” for instance, the letter
“d” is directly beneath the “n” in “and.”
7.
Edit. Once you’ve typed out the poem, you may want to adjust or change words to
polish the silhouette.
