The Renewable Sonnets of William Shakespeare (Vols. 1 & 2)

This is my first foray into electronic poetry that uses relatively large a data set, the complete Sonnets of William Shakespeare.

This project seeks to stir into a single plane all of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets.

I used Python to prepare and properly format the poetic content for the javascript engines.

Because different poems are being stirred together--as many as 14 at once--it is impossible to preserve the ABAB rhyme scheme of the originals. This results in a (vast) collection of blank verse sonnets: 14 lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter.

There are 154 to the 14th power possible combinations in this collection. So there's that.

The rendered screenshots will be slightly blurry. It pleases me that the rendering is clearly a degraded duplicate, more permanent but not as crisp as the ephemeral original.

Originally published at the New River: A Journal of Digital Art and Literature

by Curt Rode

Roethke thumbnail

What Falls Away is Always

One of my favorite lines of poetry by Theodore Roethke.  An example of text sculpture, developed using TinkerCad, displayed through Sketchfab.  Thanks to the Sketchfab interface, you can literally travel through this composition, even inside the text. I love the fact that the text casts literal shadows on the central figures.

What Falls Away Is Always
by bassthwunker
on Sketchfab

by Curt Rode

Collateral Glory

Another riff on the stir fry form, this time including audio recordings of each of the 3 poems layered together. Many thanks to Jacob Brown, Joe Schiller, Chantel L. Carlson, and Kayla Sparks for helping piece it all together.

by Curt Rode

Not the New American Hope

Not the New American Hope

An example of textual sculpture.  The image was taken with the iPhone X camera’s “Stage Light” feature. The text was added in Photoshop.

The inspiration for the sculpture was a crossing of two streams of thought: 1) at 52, I’ve fallen well out of the hopeful sentiment “children are our future,” and 2) I realize my body is coming to an end as a site of political power and privilege.

by Curt Rode

So Much Depends Upon

So Much Depends

Made with Tinkercad and hosted on Sketchfab.  An example of text sculpture that I created quickly to give my students a frame of reference for an exercise in my Digital Creative Writing class in the fall of 2018.  Here, the opening phrase from WC Williams’s most famous poem is under attack from unseen forces.

So Much Depends
by bassthwunker
on Sketchfab

by Curt Rode

Studies in Lyric

An example of kinetic typography, built in HMTL5 with Adobe Edge Animate. I've long been a defender of the lyric mode, curious about the criticism its received and in its durability nevertheless.  Here, I play with an assumption about the mode -- that it requires a certain amount of self-exposure on the part of the poet -- and have some fun with the individual letters.

by Curt Rode

Missing

Missing

An evolution of the “stir fry,” a digital poetic form invented by Jim Andrews.  Here, I layer into a single frame 3 paragraphs from an unpublished prose poem.  Andrews offers a useful description and history of the form (with practice files to build your own!) on his website.

Built with HTML, CSS, and Javascript (using Andrews’s source files).

by Curt Rode