Part
of the mission statement here at the Vrzhu Research Bureau (a wholly
imaginary subsidiary of Vrzhu Press) is to “research, develop, market
and promulgate products, techniques and technologies that will increase
poetry’s share of the public’s attention, and expand poetic awareness
in same.”
Recent
results of surveys, covert psychological testing, probability and
stochastic analysis, and observation have further refined some of our
previous findings on why poetry fails to reaches a larger target
audience, and what the obstacles are to a wider diffusion of poetic
awareness in specific demographics.
To
put it in layman’s terms, a large part of the problem with poetry’s
lack of market share and popularity is its appearance. In an
increasingly visualified world, modes of communication must maximize
their retinal impact to be effective and to spread. Poetry is woefully
lacking in this area. Horizontal lines of symbols, uniformly black,
distributed in rudimental groupings on a white matrix is pretty much
the nadir of visual interest. Even when poetry has tried to foreground
the visual aspects of its art (so called concrete poetry) the results
have almost entirely been about as stimulating as looking at, well,
concrete. Some of these attempts are even easily misconstrued as
formal errors: misspelling, scribbling, etc.
Unfortunately,
real progress won’t be made in this area until some or all of poetry’s
essential elements can be radically transformed and recontextualized
into mandatory, stimulating visual apparatus.
But the current situation is far from hopeless.
It’s
possible to up poetry’s pizzazz quotient through linkages with purely
visual information. Though detachable from the essential poemness of
the poem, these visual quanta can enter into a dialectic with the
poem-content and attach to the basic experience of the poem as it
enters consciousness.
This
is nothing new. But up until now these efforts were less than rigorous
and left up to chance, and--worse--to the whims of “creative” types,
artists, writers, collaborators.
But
we here at the VRB are taking the first small next step in the
evolution of poetry enhancement. Using algorithms developed from the
data we’ve collected, the VRB has constructed several prototypes of a
Poetic-Retinal Integrator.
When
perfected the PRI will seamlessly interweave textual and highly
stimulating visual elements into a poem that will grab and hold the
attention of almost anyone, no matter how eye-jaded.
But
talk is cheap. To give you an idea of what the future may hold, we
present an example of one of our early envisualed poems. Remember this
a “1.0” version of a manufacturing technique undergoing continuous
refinement. But we believe we’re headed in one of the right possible
directions.
The Darkling Thrush
Thomas Hardy
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervorless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
31 December 1900
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