The Fantastic Four: Four Poets, Four Books
Poster graphic I created for a National Poetry Month event in Tacoma.
PROCESS OF CREATING THE ART FOR THIS POSTER
I love performance art, computer-generated art, found art…all kinds of creativity that either sets up constraints, or breaks down traditional forms.
This poster uses computer-generated word/tag clouds.
How this is done: I took four poems from each of the four poets, and entered them separately in the online tag cloud generator Tagxedo. Tagxedo analyzed the words, then graphically displays the text by size to emphasize or minimize words, based off how many times a word is used. The larger the word, the more frequent it appeared in that poem.
I tweaked the results so each word cluster corresponded with the colors of the author’s bookcover.
For example, here’s the cover for Arlene Kim’s book, What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?–along with the word cloud generated from these four poems of hers, Bird Call, Tiger Brother, Wilderness, and American Gothic: Revival.
Although I read through about ten poems from each poet, the poems I chose to enter for their tag clouds were mostly randomly chosen. I liked the idea that this art was somewhat chancy, and assembled by computational method.
These four poets all touch on the concrete, the magical, the everyday and the bizarre. Having a poster that’s a bit prosaic (words arranged by a machine) plus specific and meaningful (in color and in highlighting their word choices) felt nicely tense.
(Hope to see you at the reading, if you’re local. It’s going to be a great event!)
THE FANTASTIC FOUR
THURSDAY • APRIL 4 • 7 PM • FREE!
4 POETS / 4 BOOKS / Derek Sheffield, Arlene Kim, Marjorie Manwaring & Rebecca Hoogs
Reading selected poems from their newest works.
Hosted by Allen Braden, TCC professor & author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood and Elegy in the Passive Voice.
KING’S BOOKS / 218 ST. HELENS AVE. TACOMA, WA 98402 / kingbookstore.com / Event Details Online