Today, Oni Buchanan gave a reading and demonstration of her poetry at the Literary House. She is highly attuned to form, and many of her poems play with her ideas of form and how the letters of the poems she writes can birth further, connected poetry. Many of her poems are actually two poems layered in such a way as to create a third, or poems inside poems.
In her Mandrake Vehicles, she takes form to a whole new level. She presents a poem in three parts, three large blocks of text, and, through flash animations, lifts "light" letters from each block poem to reveal further poems.
What I find particularly inspiring is the way Buchanan sees her poems - they are constructed word by word, letter by letter, and letters have vitality. They have the ability to move around on the page, to condense and speak further.
Even though she has taken her poetry into the digital format to give it literal movement, each letter has purpose, even the "light" letters, which, in one layer of The Mandrake Vehicles, form what she calls "detritus words" that rest below the poem.
She said that she had trouble envisioning her mandrake work in book form that would retain the fluidity of the letters, I can't help but think that she just didn't find the right book artist to help her. The traditionalist in me - hah, I work with moveable type - wants to see her layers formed by physical pages, transparent and translucent as she described in her talk. I'm imagining more pages than just one for each layer - extra pages that somehow show the tumbling of the letters... something that might even end up like a flip book.
However, regardless of my impulse toward traditional form, I absolutely love the elegance of the Flash solution.
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1 comment:
your idea reminds me of that children's book we saw at that place on cross street where it was 175 different stories because the pages were all split. i think that would be an excellent way to put her poetry into book form. that's a really brilliant idea.
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