"When movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been the poets--no matter the medium--who succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing.
Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting the clouds. Or to put it another way, the most radical
art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling."
- Robin D.G. Kelley
Poetry is a transformative force. A conduit and conductor of language, poetry shares a way to be in the world and a way the world could be. Great poetry is multi-dimensional and speaks in layered threads, sown together into a pattern.
I am interested in the patterns of poetry, and the meaning that can be revealed in their examination. I look for truth in poetry. The truth is an elusive thing, especially difficult to express and discover in moments like the one we are currently in.
The way we understand poetry is limited by our ability to express and experience it, so my hope is that by expressing and experiencing poetry in new ways, we can discover and create new words, and new worlds.
I: A Single Poem
One of my favorite poets is Hafiz. Hafiz (born Khwāja Šamsu d-Dīn Muḥammad Hāfez-e Šīrāzī) is a 14th-century Persian mystic and poet. My favorite Hafiz book is the "The Gift" translated by Daniel Ladinsky.
The resonance of Hafiz’s poems for me are not just in the words themselves as representations of ideas, but also the physical shape the words of a poem make on a page. When performing poetry, we have our voices and can express different dimensions of a poem using the many tones, timbers, and cadences our voices allow, as well as use our bodies to gesticulate our expressions, and our facial expressions to add context or emphasis to our poem. Written poetry though, is captured in time, bound to the page in a single context, taking one completed shape for the rest of its existence. The shapes and patterns that words form, the space left between them and around them, become one of the central conduits to making and finding meaning in a written poem.
Take this Hafiz poem for example:
II: The Shape Of A Poem
We can further examine the shape of this poem by visualizing
the poem as a bar chart representing the length of each line of the poem with a single bar, and a 0 for stanza breaks.
To visualize the poem and bar chart together, press the button below.
III: The "Flow" Of A Poem
Another way to explore a poem is to visualize its flow. Poems have a rhythm, a cadence, a series of peaks and valleys that guide us through the poem.
Press the button to draw the flow of the "The Violin"
IV: Intersecting Poems
By graphing the flow of multiple poems from Hafiz, we can look for patterns and shapes in the different poems. Another interesting activity for this visualization is to look for the shapes created by the intersecting flow lines of the poems. By visualizing the poems together in the same space we can create new poems made by the grouping and intersecting words of the individual poems.
Press the button to draw the flow of three poems together.
V: Custom Graphs Of A Poem
More creative visualizations of poems can provide us new ways to interpret and understand the meaning, the truth, contained in a poem. Below is a custom graph that uses the length of each line of a poem to create a circle of a corresponding size. The product is another visual representation of the poem we can experience and interpret.
Press the button to animate the visualizations.
POSSIBLE NEXT STEPS:
Creating more complex and interactive visualizations
Expanding visualizations to include the entire book of Hafiz poetry
Expanding data to include additional poets
Expanding visualizations to include comparisons of original poem text vs. translated poem text