Why Shape Poems
Poetry that visually conveys the poet's meaning through the graphic
arrangement of letters, words, or symbols on the page is called a shape
poem.
 A shape poem is a poem that describes an object and is written in the
shape of the object. There are many different online sites that
help us
in creating shape poems. 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.”
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? Let us look at some reasons that
made the idea of shape poems and the advantages with it. Shape poems
always visualize the object that they are writing the poem on.
Because
- We want to heal the pains of abstraction. Abstraction of words
is very difficult when we don’t have image in our mind. The
tendencies to abstract the correct word that suits our thought are
less without any images.
- 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.
This is an important goal to be achieved because it is always easy
to make people understand and attract them towards the knowledge
that we get from literacy through visual and oral conversations.
People don’t feel bored when they visualize the thing that we want
to study about than reading it in words.
- 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.
Let us look at the example given above. The above poem is a shape
poem that describes a rainbow it is not only in the shape of the
rainbow but also in the color of the rainbow. This increases the
rituality of the poem and increases it attraction towards it.
Thus the attractive shape poems grab the reader’s attention and
retain it .They give the children an interesting reading. SO, let us
enjoy the pleasure of reading these poems to.
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