Moving Poem: First Few Seconds and Concepts

When researching to generate concepts for the representation of Gertrude Steins poetry, I realized I needed to find out what category her poetry fell under. I soon found that her "Tender Buttons" series was one of hermetic works. I also found that her most popular works fell under the hermetic category. Now I needed to know what hermeticism is. The first definition I came across claimed that hermetic poetry was austere and difficult poetry. This didn't help, seeing that I had already realized the poetry was austere, so I read on and found that in a broad sense the term is defined as poetry in which the sounds and suggestive powers of words are more important than or equally important to the meaning of the words.

Next I came across the so-called creator of hermetic poetry, Giuseppe Ungaretti. Ungaretti was a fan of the symbolist and futurist movement and greatly believed in the simplifying of things and the abstraction of things to a core essence. I believe this core essence of an idea is what helped Ungaretti develop hermetic poetry. He looked at the words he used in his poetry as sounds. It did not matter what the poems meant but how they sound.

Considering the auditory form of the poetry over the meaning is precisely what I need to express in my rendering of Gertrude's poems into moving typography. In these videos I would like to focus on the formal aspects of her poetry. Repetition, the flow of the words, syllables and similar sounds will all be exemplified to stress the sound of the poetry over the meaning of the words. I will also reference ideas of cubism in the video to express Gertrude's interest and influence of Cubist painting.

So far this video is only an introduction of the title of one of my poems, "Asparagus". The animating of the word onto the screen is done to stress each syllable of the word. This draws more attention to the way the word sounds. Also, the syllable by syllable appearances of the letters suggest a defragmentation of the word. This defragmentation and seeing the word on multiple levels creates the suggestion of a cubist nature in the video