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February 07, 2008
Space
One interesting tool with poems and poams that I have just recently been able to identify with the help of English 340 is the idea of inhabited versus uninhabited space. I think that this was something that I had previously not consciously thought about, what the effect of spacing, both filled and unfilled had on the outcome. For myself, when I think of traditional poems, I think only of the words, of the content that almost seems to be within the area where the text is laid out. Since most copies of older poetry have many times been recopied and re-edited its hard to know what the original layout of the works were. It seems most likely to me that the only utilization of this tool was the spacing between different stanzas in the poems. While this many not seem like much, this still had a large amount of weight to it. A poem that I am familiar with, 'The Lightning is a yellow Fork,' utilizes space that is uninhabited to separate the two areas of inhabited space from each other. In English 240, I made a 3D map of my interpretation of this poem, which I will address later in this post, but what this map became for me was directly influenced by that space. As I read the poem and tried to find how I could express this poem as I saw it two others, the first thing that I noticed was that there were two distinctly different parts of this poem. What I didn't realize at the time was that the author took advantage of uninhabited space to separate these two different parts. My map is shown below.
The Map
To get a better idea of why my map was created in the form that it was, please visit my post from my explanation in English 240 about the 'map.
Unintended Consequences
When I first made this poem, it was mostly an investigation into what the poem meant to me, and how I could convey this to others. What I am starting to learn now is that many of the things that I chose to do with the map where unintended, but served a purpose. First is the framing, each part of the video was put together almost, if I can look back at it now and put a term to it, haphazardly. The placement of most things were done with an idea of how to make things fit, but I didn't realize that in doing this, I was framing the poem, and framing each image and each section of the poem. Without knowing it, I used uninhabited space in most of the slides to focus the attention on the pictures and then the text that was incorporated with the pictures. The uninhabited space was serving the purpose of focusing attention to certain parts of the map, the parts with the content. One thing that I have noticed in many of Prof. Moss' video poams is that while uninhabited space is present, most of the space within the boundaries, or frame, of the window is at one point utilized, and not left untouched by some form of being. One poam that I enjoyed when I was introduced to it last semester and I feel that utilizes all of the space, at one point or another, is 'Heat Dozens. I feel that this is such a good example of using different parts and incorporating it all into a poam that I will reference it to try and use the different elements to make my poam complete.
Posted by ndjames at February 7, 2008 08:24 PM