Shape Poems Overview
Poetry is a form of literary art that is
designed to convey the experiences, feelings or ideas in a vivid
imaginative way. Poetry is characterized by the use of language chosen
for its sound and suggestive power and by the use of literary techniques
like meter, metaphor and rhyme. Poetry is a beautiful style of
expressing the feelings. Rhythm, meter, and metrical patterns are the
elements majorly involved in poetry. Poetry is a very sweet way of
expressing ones feelings. From Ages Poetry has been taken as a tool to
express love to nature, human or god.
Shape Poems:
 Concrete poetry, pattern poetry or shape poetry is
poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important
in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the
poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, and rhyme and so on.
This is a 'shape poem'. Ideally, it should describe the shape it is, and
rhyme, but as you can see, this one doesn't. But this has given you the
basic idea about “shape poems”.
By selecting a shape, students are learning how to focus their writing
on a particular topic. This helps the students in the improvement of
their knowledge and produces a good result. In addition, as part of the
online tool, students are prompted to brainstorm, write, and revise
their poems, thus reinforcing elements of the writing process. Students
can also print their finished shape poems, cut and color them, and
display them in the classroom or at home.
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.
Example
Consider the following pattern. It is a poem about a tree. Readers
have to also note that arrangement of the words in the poem represents a
tree. Thus before reading the poem we come to an idea that the poem is
all about a tree. The poem describes how a tree grows and extends their
branches and gives us happiness. It also tells us the importance of
growing a tree and takes care of it regularly.
|
