What's Next for Text:
3. Shape Poetry
Western notation had been trying to create this compression for a long time. It fulfills a traditional genre called “shape poetry.” Shape poems, or pattern poems, are poems whose shape refers to their subject: a poem about an altar in the shape of an altar, a poem about an ax in the shape of one, a poem about an umbrella which outlines a raised umbrella. It is an old genre. The earliest shape poem we know of is by the Greek poet Simias of Rhodes, who flourished about 300 B.C. He wrote a poem, in the shape of an ax, “probably meant to be inscribed on a votive copy of the ax with which Epeius made the Wooden Horse, in which the Greeks finally penetrated Troy and ended the war.” And he wrote a famous poem, meant to be written on an egg and in the shape of one. In both poems, you must read first the top line, then the last, then next-to-top, then next-to-last, and so on. The usual pattern of reading, a line at a time, is inverted, so that we become self-conscious about putting the lines together into sensible meaning. And in both poems, the usual inscriptional substrate (papyrus, presumably, for Simias) is discarded in favor of mapping the words onto the actual objects to which they refer. Computer graphics now does such “texture mapping” routinely, wrapping objects, or text, in whatever surface pattern is required.
Since Simias, shape poems have been written at many times, in many languages, and in all kinds of shapes. One of my favorites is the contemporary poet John Hollander’s “Idea: Old Mazda lamp, 50-100-150 W.”
Here, the light bulb shape, so familiar to us as the shape which keeps the dark at bay, becomes a visual focus for a meditation on the ideas which light the mind, on visual seeing as intellectual seeing. The effects that the light bulb has on us are contained in the shape of the bulb, thus blending text and its effect on us in a visual pun. The physical act of turning on the bulb becomes, by the end of the poem, the metaphysical act of turning on the light of the universe.
Why contrive poems like this? Why combine an abstract alphabetical signal with a visual image? Why did people continue to find it of interest for two and a half millennia? Because we want to heal the pains of abstraction. We want to insert the text into the 3D physical world, to engrave it onto the 3D world of stuff, just as we do with tombstones and public monuments. We want to bring the world of literacy, and all that literacy brings with it, into the world of objects and of oral conversation. We want to breach the gulf between letters and the world of objects: our old friends stuff and fluff. An utterance like this makes us alternate our attention between the text, an abstract world, and a familiar three-dimensional object from our everyday world. When our eye, top-to-bottom, maps the text onto its object, we are made to feel self-conscious about how we see. We are asked to ponder, to keep ever in mind, the uneasy relationship between words and the objects to which they refer.
But this effort, though of long standing, has never gotten much respect. It isn’t “serious,” however cleverly it may puzzle about the relationship between words and things. We might profitably ask ourselves why. Words create one order of meaning, images another, and we don’t want them too close together. Our alphabetic habit of mind rejects pictographs and ideographs, notations which use a picture of the object to denote the object. Writing systems like these, which use images rather than an abstract alphabet, assume the punning compression which kinetic text often reenacts. The great victory of the alphabet was to separate thought from image, and we don’t want to compromise that victory. But, as the long tradition of pattern poetry attests, we also want to bring the alphabetic world back into the behavioral one.