Final Project Final Draft

Final Project Rough Draft 2

Final Draft of Independent Research Project

The Digital Poetry of Thomas Swiss

Thomas Swiss is an American Poet and professor of English and Rhetoric at the University of Iowa. He has written and edited many books on the role of the internet in American culture, and books of poetry. There hasn’t been a lot written about his past or his inspiration and motivation to write poetry. Swiss has a website dedicated to his digital poetry. The website is a collaborative effort between Swiss and several web animation designers and photographers. Several of the poems can be found in his book Rough Cut: Poems. For this research project I will critique some of his digital poems and explain what I learned from them and how they affected me.

The first poem I want to talk about is “Shy Boy”. This is a poem about a shy boy in school who wishes he could disappear. The digital animation for this poem is very basic. It has a white background and uses grey bars that vary in size and length. In between these gray bars is the text of the poem. Some of the lines of the poem fade in and fade out, and some glade across the screen. As I watched this animation, I wondered what do the grey bars represent? For most of the animation the bars fit snugly around the text of the poem. So I thought that it could be Swiss’ way of using the bars a symbol of tightness or being uncomfortable. The speaker in the poem says “You know what he wants to do? Vanish./ If he could make this difficult wish come true,/ but he can’t. Like an eclipse.”

This quote from the poem paints a picture of a kid who is somewhat socially awkward who wishes he could disappear. “Shy Boy” in terms of subject matter and content is my favorite of the Swiss digital poems because I can relate to it. I used to be the shy kid in class who barely spoke, and stayed to himself. When I was reading the poem it took me back to my childhood. Although the animations for this poem are basic, it does a good job of getting the message across to the reader.

The second poem I’d like to discuss is “The Problem”. There aren’t any moving animations in this poem, but there are a lot of stationary animations and graphics. “The Problem” is a poem about how a man meets a woman at a play rehearsal. The man and woman develop a friendship, but after a while the man begins to see the woman’s true personality. The woman has drinking issues and constantly needs someone to talk to. The man can’t seem to pull himself away from the woman despite being annoyed by her. The speaker of the poem says “I was too vain and needy. And her? Worse. Calling me on the phone or coming over. I mean pretty soon my whole life was her. I couldn’t do anything else. It was always listen I have to talk. And I heard the urgency. I heard the desperation in her voice. That hooked me.” On opening night of the play everything goes smoothly. The man and woman go to the movies to see “The Blue Angel” where they decide to end their friendship.

“The Problem” is constructed out of images of the man and woman, and random pieces of paper with handwriting on them. There are also some images of a man and woman with tape on their eyes and mouth that are somewhat disturbing. The way this poem is designed is exactly what I want to do with my own poetry. I want to be able to combine the text of the poetry with images that will help bring the poem to life the same Swiss has done with this poem. I’m learning how to use images to enhance the meaning behind the words of my poetry.

The poem “City of Bits” is constructed similarly to “The Problem” with images of the city with each line and stanza of the poem displayed in various types of text. “City of Bits” is a poem about a man who meets a woman while going for a stroll in the downtown area of the city. They have a brief conversation and during that conversation the woman is mugged while jogging. The man goes on living his life, and sees the woman at a concert in Chicago a few years later. After seeing her at the concert, they part ways again. The man beings missing her and is surprised to receive a message from her on his voicemail. She leaves a voicemail describing a dream and she asks how did she know he would stroll again?

“Prologue” is a nature poem. In this poem Swiss is describing nature around him and he says “I believe that anything I can say about the wind has already been said.” The animation in the poem ties in the theme of poem. The primary animations are in the background. The background contains various images of plant life that change color as the poem progresses. The animations in this poem are not complex but they serve a purpose and help create an environment that allows the reader to experience the poem rather than just reading it. I think Swiss does a great job of making sure that all the animations are meaningful and help enhance the message he is trying to convey in his poems.

I noticed a recurring theme in Swiss’ poems the recurring theme is that the main characters in most of his poems seem to be socially awkward. In “Shy Boy” the boy wishes he could vanish so he wouldn’t have to deal with his class mates. In “The Problem” the man is kind of regretfully intrigued by a woman with a drinking problem and psychological issues, and in “City of Bits” the man is loner who meets a woman he has very little interaction with, but he misses her as if she is a loved one. I wonder how much of Swiss’ personal life is in his poems?

I have done a lot research on this project to find out why Swiss chose these poems to be animated and why he chose to animate them the way that he did. I was unsuccessful at finding any credible information explaining Swiss’ plan for animating the poems. Although Swiss did not do any of the animations himself, it was a collaborative effort between Swiss and computer animators. I’m pretty sure Swiss had final say on how the poems would be animated. So, since I was unable to the find information that I was looking for I can only assume that Swiss picked these poems to be animated because they provided the best narrative. The poems that I have critiqued in this paper all have the same thing in common, they tell stories.

The stories these poems tell are stories of the human experience. These poems all are built on concrete imagery which makes them easier for the computer animators to animate because they don’t have to create some fantasy world. They can simply create environments that pretty much anybody can relate to, which is very important when composing animations because if the audience can’t make some type of emotional connection with the animation or art they will quickly disregard it and move on to the next thing.

I think Swiss realizes the potential of digital animation in terms of inviting the audience into his world or the state of mind he was in while writing the poem. He also realizes that the average poetry reader has probably read hundreds and maybe even thousands of poems throughout their lifetime. Most of these poems are written or typed on white paper using black ink and are limited in the ways they can be presented on the page. With digital animation the possibilities on how the poem can be presented to the audience is limitless. The animations will be as good as the animator’s imagination and skill level. Even though Swiss did not animate these poems himself, the computer animators made sure that their animations did not alter the message or destroy the integrity of the poem.

I chose to critique these poems because they all had a character or a situation I could relate to. For example in the poem “Shy Boy” I could relate to the main character being shy and wanting to leave the classroom, because I have been in that exact same situation where I avoided interacting with my classmates and had a strong desire to leave the classroom. In “Prologue” I could relate to how Swiss was describing nature. I have written several nature poems in my life including a nature poem that I wrote specifically for this class titled “Time to Change Clothes”. The poem talks about how leaves fall off trees so the snow can clothe them.

The reason I decided to do this project on Thomas Swiss is because I enjoy his poetry, and I really enjoy how the digital animations compliment his poems. A lot of the animation techniques used in the poems that I have critiqued is very similar to the animations that I hope to use in my poetry someday. Watching Swiss’ poems over and over again has allowed me to study exactly how each animation serves a purpose in telling the story and creating an experience that will stick with the audience for a long time. I wish that I get a better technical understanding of the animations in terms of how the animation was composed, that would allow me to use some of the “tricks of the trade” in my own work.

In this class the primary focus is on composing my own animations. But this project has allowed the tables to be turned and for the point of view to be shifted. Instead of approaching the animations for the composer’s perspective, I have approached it from the viewer’s perspective. My perception of digital animation completely changed when I had to experience the animation instead of building it. I had to form an emotional connection with the animation rather than knowing where all the connections would be made. This project has given me a better appreciation for digital poetry and its’ potential.

Links to Poems

Shy Boy: http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/swiss/shyboy/shyboy.html

The Problem: http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/swiss/problem/

City of Bits: http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/swiss/cob/index.html

Prologue: http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/swiss/prologue/


Thomas Swiss Digital Poetry Website: http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/swiss/projects.htm

Final project rough draft

Thinking About Final Project

What I want to remember from the convos is how excited some people were when they heard my idea for the project. I want to remember this so I can create a project that lives up to that excitement.

I think my final project will be moving. That is... if I can execute the project how I see it in my mind.

My final project won't just be about the illustration of words. I would like to uses some images to accompany the words which will help stir up an emotional response from the audience. I think whenever someone can make an emotional connection to a piece of art or literature they appreciate the art a lot more.

As of right now I don't know what kind help I will need to do this project. I won't know until I actually start. But I will probably ask Anne for suggestions on how to improve the project.

What did I learn from the short project?

For this project I learned how to combine images with text. Which added a new layer to my poem. If I had more time I would try to turn the pictures into text, that was my original plan but I never learned how to do it. Also I was torn about if I should animate the words from the poem, making them appear in different ways on top of the images, but since my computer crashed I had to make some major adjustments so I could have the project completed on time and I just didn't have the time to make those animations. Overall I think my project is pretty good given the amount of time I had to do it. If I could start from scratch I would make the pictures turn into text. The whole concept of this project was to make the pictures turn into text, but since I didn't learn how to do that I had to come up with another plan which is the animation you see now.

Short Project Final Draft