3-D Poetry

Amy is having an(other) effect on me. She’s making me think that I can do more with words than just type them. She’s been working on, among other things, three-dimensional stories. That, combined with a trip we recently took to the Jaffe Center for Book Arts, has gotten even me interested in trying something I almost never do–visual arts.

I can’t draw to save my life, and I can’t paint either. Woodworking is about as close as I’ve ever come, but I can’t say I have a knack for that either. And I’m not going to claim that this icosidodecahedron is any great shakes yet either, but it has given me a new way to look at how I can construct a poem.

The figure is made up of 32 equilateral triangles. 4 triangles combine to make an inverted pyramid–there are six of these, connected by 8 equilateral triangles. Eventually, I want to put pictures on the eight triangular flat surfaces. This “poem” is dealing with the oil-cano in the Gulf, so I’m guessing the images could be company logos of those involved. Inside the inverted pyramids, I have what could be called quatrains–very short ones, given the space I have to work with at present, though I’d like to scale this model up and make them longer–and what I’m trying for, though this is tougher, is some wispier connection between the lines of the different quatrains that ring the flat, outer triangles. I’m less confident about pulling that part off.

But even if I never go anywhere with this, it’s a way to push my own boundaries, my own limits, and that’s something I’ve been bad about doing in the past. I’ll let you know how it goes.