illustrator word visualization

Poetry book

On Turning Ten

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

Billy Collins

Change of plans. I was originally going to do the Robert Frost or other Billy Collins poem, but after reading this one, I felt such a personal connection to it. In the poem the boy is mourning turning ten, because he feels that his childhood has ended, and he is turning an age that marks the beginning of another chapter in his life that he does not necessarily want to start yet. While the poem is sad, it is also charmingly humorous, because the boy is only turning ten but already he is nostalgic for his past. We often hear about forty or fifty year olds complaining about how old they are...but we rarely (or at least I rarely) hear is from a ten year old. He is a wise young boy.

For my book I want to keep it a simple book format. I am considering cutting the book into a specific shape but I have not decided yet. I want the illustrations to be black and white with an emphasis on lines to create movement. The black and white also adds to the more forlorn tone of the poem. I want there to be an occasional splash of color on each page that links it to the words of the poem. For instance, the bicycle that's leaning against the garage will be blue, but the blue is dripping off it and onto the driveway.

Poem Visualization

Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

I love the imagery in his poem and how he effortlessly personifies what a poem should be. In high school I took AP Literature and I really learned to analyze and appreciate poetry. Sometimes however, in my eagerness to dissect the meaning of a poem and squeeze out whatever I could from it, I missed the experience of the poem and did not grasp what the poet wanted the reader to understand. Yes, we can pull out all these metaphors and crazy deep meanings, but that is not always necessary. Poet Laureate Billy Collins is telling us that a poem speaks on its own...we don't need to speak for it.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Call it a cliche Robert Frost poem but I love this poem because it is so nostalgic with its quiet scene. The speaker of the poem however, is torn between watching nature unfold in all its marvel of the woods filling up with snow and the things he must do...things to cross off his list of things to do to put it practically. The allure of nature is so powerful, but the horse serves as a reminder that he has promises to keep and places to go.

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices? 

I read this poem as a senior in high school for my AP Literature class and it really struck a cord in me. How many times have I known and seen my father work hard and not appreciated, thanked, or acknowledged his efforts? In this poem it is a Sunday. Sunday is a time of rest, a time of thanksgiving--the Sabbath day. But still he worked in the "blueblack cold." The speaker is the son who, looking back as an adult, realized his father's love through his own experiences and hardships. More than in a worldly sense however, I compared this father's love to God's love. Jesus who was innocent died on the cross in place of our sins so that we did not have to be punished. Yet how many people take it for granted? Trample on his sacrifice each day?

Dia: Beacon

The Dia: Beacon was a very different experience in comparison to any other museum I have been to. As a frequenter of New York’s Metropolitan Museum and the MoMa, the Dia: Beacon was a breath of fresh air, literally. The galleries were spacious and the white walls expansive. It made the viewer feel small and the artwork seem bigger, not in a grandiose sense but in a kind of homage to the artwork and the artists who designed it. The presentation of the works was a fuller and more complete experience than just a piece of art on a wall or a sculpture amidst a room of other sculptures.
The series of giant colored shapes by Imi Knoebel was especially powerful in engulfing the viewer in color. The piece embraces you, surrounding your vision so that it is all that you can see—massive canvases of color on a sea of white space. I also greatly enjoyed the floor to ceiling string frames by Fred Sandback. The string frames encompassed space, yet the series of frames took on a whole other dimension. Sol Lewitt’s drawing on walls redefined the typical use of line, and used lines, spaced at different intervals, to create hues of color.
While the museum contained many types of design and art, a unifying theme that I kept seeing was the great respect the artists had for their materials, and the specificity in which the materials were chosen. Wooden boxes with crazy wood grains (Donald Judd) were left unlacquered or painted, and the beauty of the organic material was allowed to breathe and to be exposed. Much of the artwork was on bigger scales, but instead of being menacing, there was a friendly, quirky element to many of the pieces, inviting the spectator to become a participator.