Typographics

There are a few poems in my back-catalogue which I consider "typographics". By which I mean, that at the time I wrote the poems I was very concerned with where the words fell on the page. These poems were originally printed in notebooks, then recorded using a Selectric typewriter.

It's a challenge to reproduce these poems on the web; the difference in pixels-per-inch from one computer screen to the next make it impossible to predict where the words will appear from reader's point of view. Aside from complex coding to cover all potential platforms, I can think of three potential solutions: Flash, image (or PDF), or accepting the limitations of HTML and cascading stylesheets. For the poems in my on-line chap-book, The Saturn Sequence, I have chosen the last solution — creating something on my personal screen that I find satisfying, and accepting the reality that it will not appear exactly the same on every other screen.

These typographic poems seem to fall into two categories. The first category cover instances where a word or phrase begins a new thought, but I want it to be "counted" as part of the preceding line. This is a technique I picked up from certain editions of Shakespeare's plays.

As you are probably aware, Shakespeare's plays are written in iambic pentameter [see Wikipedia entry]. Occasionally, one character's line will consist of one part of the line of pentameter, and another character will complete it. These editions of Shakespeare's plays make this clear by printing the lines thus:
One: Blah, blah, blah.
Two: Ah, but blah blah blah blah blah.

In "Farmer of the Night", an attempted sonnet, my motivation for word placement is the same:
Now I am autumn.
 And I was the sea.
Whether the two halves of this "line" combine to produce true iambic pentameter may be debatable, but there is no question that the second half introduces a new idea.

A free-verse poem in which I use this technique is "Never Thunders in Hades". Here, the word "watching" serves as one of several repetends, and seems to float back and forth across the page. The intention is that different subjects are "watching" throughout the poem — "when the night is full" in the first four lines; "for starry evenings" in the third paragraph (assuming the indention of the word "watching" defines the beginning of a new paragraph).

Two other poems use typography in a different way. Both "Poetry Tonight" and "The Green House" have blocks of words which appear in different areas of the page. These block of words are stanzas. The intent of the technique seems most obvious in "Poetry Tonight," where the stanzas are juxtaposed with black-and-white photographs, as if to suggest the stanzas are themselves a type of emotional photograph. In fact, the penultimate stanza reads, "Just faces in a crowd scene / Painted in gouache / By George Grosz."

"The Green House" is the most experimental of this set. Sentences are broken apart. One line is spread across the page/screen. The title appears at the bottom of the poem, rather than the top. One might reasonably charge that the typographic format is more self-conscious display than poetic device.

As in "Poetry Tonight," the stanzas are grouped by sense-unit. The scattering of these sense-units might reflect the fact that the history of the house in question is scattered and fragmentary.

The poetry I've written over the past two years has been more typographically traditional. I suspect this is primarily because I do most of my composing on screen, rather than on a page.

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