viz. - visual poetry

Lesson Plan - Teaching Poetry with Image Databases

ebfrye — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:00:19 +0000

Image credit: My video "reading" of Donald Revell's "Election Year"

Last semester I began to experiment with various programs, particularly iMovie, as I think about how I'd make digital technology part of a course that focuses on poetry. In a brief post, I included a model iMovie file, and speculated as to how such an exercise might be used. Today, as we wrap up National Poetry Month, I'm posting a lesson plan that articulates the possibilities for this exercise more directly.

Goals:

Interpretation of content, historical analysis, visual literacy, public performance, class editions, citation, fair use

Overview of Assignment:

Each week one or two students create a digital “reading” of a poem using images. Students use image databases, such as the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs collection, to pair relevant images with a poem of their choosing. They then record themselves reading the poem and arrange the images in an order of their choosing using a program such as iMovie. On their assigned day, students present their “readings” to the class, and the class is asked to respond. Students are also required to submit a process essay with their pieces that explains the rationale for their poem and image selection and how they are using images to “interpret” the piece. The essay should include a bibliography. The videos will be posted to a class blog or a class YouTube account. The exercise can be used to supplement or reinvigorate the recitation/ public performance exercises that are traditionally part of poetry pedagogy. Posting the videos in a common digital space create a class archive or collection of work, which could lead to further discussions about selection criteria and canonization.

The assignment may be repeated more than once during the semester to suit various ends:

-contextualize the poem historically using images appropriate to the poem’s time period

-interpret the poem’s content (may involve historically relevant but unaffiliated images)

-supplement their own pieces (in a workshop if the instructor assigns any creative writing assignments) with digitally available images or images they produce themselves

The assignment could also be done with an excerpt from a prose piece instead of a poem.

Assignment Length:

Semester-long project with each student contributing 2 videos and 2 process essays (4-5 pages and bibliography)

Materials:

iMovie, YouTube, image databases (Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs collection, New York Public Library Digital Archives, Library of Congress’s American Memory, etc.), class blog (optional)

Preparation Guidance:

Students should be introduced to and spend some time browsing image databases during class. They should also receive instruction for how to use iMovie and have some time to practice. It will also be helpful for them to have a model video, and you will need to set up a class YouTube account as a way to post their videos online. You may then choose to link those videos to a class blog. The videos should work in tandem with class discussions. These may emphasize the interaction of written and visual texts, historicist reading methods, the role of performance, and the impact of digital technology on literary production and presentation.

Exhibiting Poetry and Rhetoric

EmilyBloom — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:39:48 +0000

Image Credit: Screen Shot from the National Library of Ireland

While conducting research on W.B. Yeats I encountered this fascinating online exhibition from the National Library of Ireland that raised interesting questions for me about the relationship between visual rhetoric and literary archives. Like many other graduate students teaching rhetoric while writing a dissertation on literature, I often wonder about the interconnections between the two fields and what ideas crossover and what do not. Yeats, in many ways, seems like the perfect place to start to blur lines between the rhetorical, the literary, the visual and the auditory. Navigating this website, I was struck by the extent to which the virtual museum brings together these fields and makes visible Yeats’s complicatedly interdisciplinary and multi-sensory career.

This exhibition includes virtual rooms recreating spaces that Yeats inhabited, display cases with clickable first editions and manuscripts, videos with scholarly commentators discussing Yeats’s biography and works and images of various artifacts displayed in the collection. One of the advantages of the online exhibition is that the viewer can virtually turn pages of documents that would otherwise be static in the display cases. In this manner, I was able to leaf through a few pages of a first edition without having to visit the archive.

Image Credit: Screen Shot from the National Library of Ireland

The exhibit also displays a few instances of visual literary criticism, such as a compelling chart that tracks the composition of Yeats’s The Tower. By clicking on the icon of a single poem, the display highlights a line tracking the publication history. Three poems—“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Leda and the Swan” and “Sailing to Byzantium”— are linked to auditory commentary on Yeats’s extensive revision process.

Image Credit: Screen Shot from the National Library of Ireland

In many respects, the strategies of this exhibition are similar to those in Yeats’s broadsides. In these broadsides, published by the Cuala Press, Yeats included visual prints, poetic text and sheet music to combine different sensory experiences in works that were, on several levels, blurring the tenuous lines between rhetoric and art.

Visual Tweets

EmilyBloom — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:15:45 +0000

Image credit: From YouTube
H/T to A Mutual Respect

Full confession: I just joined Twitter about 30 minutes ago. However, for considerably longer, I've been curious about the significance of Twitter's text-based 140-character format. Although Twitter contains some visuals such as profile pictures and links, it is primarily a print-based medium. The viewer experiences Twitter posts, or tweets, as a wall of sentences. While tweets are themselves primarily textual in nature, two recent videos offer visual interpretations that play with the relationship between image and text.

The first, by http://markfullmer.com/ ">Mark Fullmer, uses the 140-character constraint of tweets to take on the most iconic of American genres-- the road odyssey. In the video for Tweet, Tweet: A mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the American open road odyssey, Fullmer voices these micropoetic tweets over black and white footage of the passing scenery. The video begins with the image of a twitter feed, but most of the subsequent imagery focuses on the western landscape. Once on the road, Fullmer shows himself jotting his words onto a pad of paper as he drives. In the sense that Fullmer writes rather than texts his words on the journey, tweets become a poetic constraint rather than a new media per se.

Image credit: From The Washington Post on YouTube
H/T to Kevin Bourque

A very different visual interpretation of tweets is the Washington Post satire of celebrity tweets called “Twits." In this series of visual/text juxtapositions, actors read celebrity tweets with all the pomp of a Masterpiece Theatre production. Emphasizing the grammatical mistakes, bizarre punctuation and tonal oddity of these tweets, the actors illustrate not only the strangeness of celebrity but also, the absurdity of our interest in them.

Together, these videos led me to think about the nature of the tweet and the kinds of restraints, opportunities and follies it engenders. As Fullmer says in Tweet Tweet, “A tweet is not a text, not haiku, not a telegraph. Stop. A tweet is.” I’d be interested to see what other kinds of visual rhetoric and poetry the tweet may inspire. Is there any way to visually capture the back-and-forth quality of tweets? Can a visualized tweet recreate the immediacy of the ever-changing updates?

Stan Brakhage, "Mothlight" (1963)

dsmith — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:17:45 +0000

Here, the great film artist Stan Brakhage has pressed insect parts and other organic debris onto film for this quickly animated art house classic. I like these sorts of image environments, wherein rhetorical theory is challenged by formalist values. As a rhetorician films such as this force me to consider how authorial vision, technology, and media collude to create vivid commentary or statements, in this case about the temporality of life.