"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]


Showing posts with label Visual Poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Visual Poetry. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

(Shaped) Poetry of Maps & Geography & Things




Source Link - The Backyard Geographer


Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is widely regarded as one of America’s most important and enduring poets. Born in Massachusetts and raised in Nova Scotia, she traveled widely as an adult, spending extended periods in France, Florida, and Brazil before returning to New England in the later part of her life. Geography and locale are common subject matter in her poems, which often arrive at powerful, subjective realizations from a close, detailed look at the objective world. Perhaps no Bishop poem so explicitly investigates her fondness of geography better than “The Map,” the first poem from her collection North and South, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1956. In this poem, the reader joins the narrator/poet pouring over a map, delighting in its nuances, and ultimately reveling in its beauty.


The Map

Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?

The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of the seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
–the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.

Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves’ own conformation:
and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
–What suits the character or the naive waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.


- Elizabeth Bishop


* * * * * * * * * *


Two days ago I saw in New Yorker the translation of the poem of one of the greatest Polish poets –Wisława Szymborska, recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2012 at the age of 88. The last poem she was working on just before she passed away is called ‘Map’ and I believe it perfectly summarizes why you and me love maps. This is the first English translation made from Polish by Clare Cavanagh. - Alex Buczkowski

MAP

Wisława Szymborska
Flat as the table
it’s placed on.
Nothing moves beneath it
and it seeks no outlet.
Above—my human breath
creates no stirring air
and leaves its total surface
undisturbed.
Its plains, valleys are always green,
uplands, mountains are yellow and brown,
while seas, oceans remain a kindly blue
beside the tattered shores.
Everything here is small, near, accessible.
I can press volcanoes with my fingertip,
stroke the poles without thick mittens,
I can with a single glance
encompass every desert
with the river lying just beside it.
A few trees stand for ancient forests,
you couldn’t lose your way among them.
In the east and west,
above and below the equator—
quiet like pins dropping,
and in every black pinprick
people keep on living.
Mass graves and sudden ruins
are out of the picture.
Nations’ borders are barely visible
as if they wavered—to be or not.
I like maps, because they lie.
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
not of this world.
Translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh
NewYorker April, 14th, 2014
* * * * * * * * * *




Poetry About Places - http://www.poetryatlas.com/

The Poet and the Map file:///C:/Users/All%20World%20Voyager/Downloads/825-4023-1-PB.pdf

Scottish Poetry Library A Country Shaped Like Butterfly Wings

Concrete or Shaped Poetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_poetry






The Mystery of Extraordinarily Accurate Medieval Maps

Beautifully detailed portolan charts present historians with a puzzle: How were they made? A mathematical analysis offers some clues.

By Julie Rehmeyer|Tuesday, May 27, 2014
One of the most remarkable and mysterious technical advances in the history of the world is written on the hide of a 13th-century calf. Inked into the vellum is a chart of the Mediterranean so accurate that ships today could navigate with it. Most earlier maps that included the region were not intended for navigation and were so imprecise that they are virtually unrecognizable to the modern eye.
With this map, it’s as if some medieval mapmaker flew to the heavens and sketched what he saw — though in reality, he could never have traveled higher than a church tower.
The person who made this document — the first so-called portolan chart, from the Italian word portolano, meaning “a collection of sailing directions” — spawned a new era of mapmaking and oceanic exploration. For the first time, Europeans could accurately visualize their continent in a way that enabled them to improvise new navigational routes instead of simply going from point to point.
That first portolan mapmaker also created an enormous puzzle for historians to come, because he left behind few hints of his method: no rough drafts, no sketches, no descriptions of his work. “Even with all the information he had — every sailor’s notebook, every description in every journal — I wouldn’t know how to make the map he made,” says John Hessler, a specialist in modern cartography at the Library of Congress.
But Hessler has approached the question using a tool that is foreign to most historians: mathematics. By systematically analyzing the discrepancies between the portolan charts and modern ones, Hessler has begun to trace the mapmaker’s tracks within the maps themselves.
oldest-portolan-chart
The oldest portolan chart in the Library of Congress collection, drawn between 1290 and 1350, depicts the Mediterranean Sea and the western Black Sea.
Library of Congress Geography and Map Division
From Butterflies to Maps
Hessler’s path to mathematical cartography began with butterflies. A frustrated chemical engineer and a passionate amateur lepidopterist, he decided in 2000 to take a one-year contract job in the French Alps, studying the evolutionary relationships among the many butterfly species endemic to the region. He learned to use mapping software to track different butterflies’ geographic locations and deployed a technique called morphometrics to assess the relationships between the precise placement of the spots on their wings.
In his analyses, Hessler began by conceptualizing each wing as if it were drawn on a thin metal plate. In a computer simulation, he twisted and bent the plate to move the spots on the wing so they matched those on the wing of a butterfly in another region. He then calculated how much energy it would take to distort the metal into the new shape. The less energy required, the more similar the positions of the spots — and, perhaps, the more closely related the butterflies. 
When his adventure in the Alps ended, Hessler’s newfound mapping expertise landed him a job as a curator at the Library of Congress, where one of his duties was to maintain the vault that holds the institution’s most rare and important maps.
There, for the first time, he saw a portolan chart, a coffee table-size map of the Mediterranean Sea. The rendering, created in 1559, was so accurate that it almost looked modern. The sole of Italy’s boot had its improbable, graceful arch. He could make out each cove around Tunis. Tarifa and Tangier reached toward one another, like teeth, at the Strait of Gibraltar. It was a far cry from earlier Ptolemaic maps (see “Mapping the World,” below), in which Italy’s boot was painfully twisted and the teeth at the Strait of Gibraltar were stretched into flat hammer faces. 
The portolan chart’s inland portions were decidedly less modern, but they showed no shortage of imagination, featuring pictures of Italian dukes and, in Africa, unicorns and elephants illustrating “travelers’ tales.” But Hessler paid little attention to the fanciful characters. “The minute I saw one of the portolans, I was interested in its structure,” Hessler says. “It’s so different from the mathematical structure you see in [modern] maps.” 
The basic mathematical problem every mapmaker confronts is that the Earth is spherical and maps are flat. Imagine flattening a portion of a paper globe: You’ll either have to tear the paper or crinkle it up to squish it down. Many modern maps solve this problem by using so-called Mercator projections, which turn the lines of latitude parallel to the equator and the lines of longitude that converge at the Earth’s poles into a tidy grid of perpendicular lines on a flat plane.
What Hessler saw on the portolan chart was a different solution: a seemingly random pattern of lines showing the 16 directions (north, northeast, east-northeast and so on), spreading out from various locations. It seemed as though this helter-skelter mess of lines served as a kind of skeleton for the map — its “mathematical structure” — just like the tidy grid does for modern maps. 
Fresh from his work using morphometric analyses to compare Alpine butterfly species, Hessler realized that a similar approach might allow him to compare a portolan chart with modern maps — and maybe even shed some light on the mystery of how they were made. Perhaps, he thought, he would find uniform distortions that would give a hint about how the portolan mapmakers approached their art.
Mysterious Method
To begin, Hessler studied the charts’ history. Before the first portolan charts were drawn in the 13th century, Mediterranean sailors had no reliable drawings to guide them; instead, they relied on compass measurements combined with experience and lore to navigate the sea. Their sailing records consisted of nothing more than lists of ports in the order that ships would encounter them, along with annotations including estimated directions, sailing times between ports and perhaps some sketches of geographic contours visible from afar, such as headlands projecting into the sea.
Hessler pictured the first portolan mapmaker at work, methodically working out some way to improve ships’ odds of making it safely from port to port. He suspected the mapmaker began with one sailor’s notes and sketches from a single voyage, starting at a single port — say, Naples. Then, perhaps, he drew a line to the next port, using the recorded sailing direction and time as his guide. He would have traced the journey to the next port, and then the next, making a circuit of the Mediterranean until his pen brought him back to Naples.
But the mapmaker would have run into a problem: The vagaries of wind, sea and imperfect records inevitably threw off the measurements, so that upon completing his vicarious journey, the mapmaker wouldn’t land exactly on his starting spot. So he would have had to nudge his ports around to spread out the error. If he did the same thing again using a different set of sailing records, he would end up with ports in slightly different locations, and he would need to tweak the results again. No two of his charts would be exactly the same, and none would be quite right. The mystery is how he managed to reconcile all this contradictory, incomplete information into one brilliantly precise chart of the Mediterranean that allowed mariners to visualize, for the first time, the sea on which they’d spent their lives sailing. 

John Wolter/A Portolan Atlas of the Mediterranean Sea and Western European Waters/Library of Congress
What Are the Key Features of a Portolan Chart?
This chart comes from a portolan atlas of the Mediterranean Sea and western European waters. Dating from about 1550, it is rare, since few such atlases from this period have survived. It has been attributed to Joan Oliva, the most prolific member of a large family of Catalan chart-makers. The chart exemplifies many key characteristics of portolan charts.
Rhumb lines (1): These lines run out in 16 directions from points on the chart. It is unknown why these particular points were chosen and why certain points are illustrated with a compass rose whereas others are not. 
Distortions (2): Portolan mapmakers lavished care on the Mediterranean because of the volume of maritime commerce there. Around Britain, the inaccuracies are greater. 
Details of coastline (3): The coastline is drawn with incredible accuracy, including the precise shapes of coves that a sailing ship couldn’t enter. 
Port names (4): The name of each port is written alongside it, giving the coastline a soft appearance at a glance. Every aspect of the chart is drawn by hand.
portolan-underlying-structure
To examine the underlying structure of this 1475 portolan chart, Hessler took a grid on a modern map and transferred it point by point to the chart. This method revealed a fairly consistent rotation of 8.5 degrees, which corresponds to the declination (the difference between magnetic and true north) at the time the chart was drawn.
John Hessler/Library of Congress Geography and Map Division
Clues in the Errors
Hessler began to look for clues within the portolan charts themselves. Borrowing the morphometric techniques he used to track movement of the Alpine butterflies’ spots, he transferred each point from a modern Mercator map of the Mediterranean onto the equivalent point on the oldest
portolan chart at the Library of Congress. According to carbon dating of its calfskin substrate, this document was created sometime between 1290 and 1350. 
The resulting grid on the portolan chart was slightly distorted in various small ways — not surprising, given the imprecise sailing data with which the mapmaker likely had to work. But it was also fairly consistently rotated by 8.5 degrees counterclockwise. Why?
Hessler suspected the skew was an artifact of compasses, which had arrived in Europe from China not long before the map was created. He knew that compasses respond to the Earth’s magnetic field, which is generated by molten iron moving in the Earth’s outer core. But magnetic north doesn’t line up perfectly with true north, the point where the Earth’s axis hits the surface (and above which the North Star sits). The difference between magnetic and true north, called magnetic declination, varies slightly with time and place, reflecting shifts in the flow of the molten iron. Modern mapmakers correct for declination by adding or subtracting the appropriate number of degrees for particular locations.
Working from compass measurements but not correcting for declination could cause just the kind of rotation Hessler’s analysis revealed. So he went on the hunt for information about historic declination and found a book that provided mathematical models estimating how the declination has changed over time. He consulted the estimates for around 1300, and bingo: 8.5 degrees. Now Hessler had strong evidence that the mapmaker, relying on sailors’ records, didn’t correct his measurements for declination. After all, Mediterranean mariners had no need to worry about how their charts were oriented with respect to the globe — they just needed a reliable guide for the region. 
Hessler’s detective work turned up one other clue to the mapmaker’s method: Although the rotation was close to 8.5 degrees throughout the chart, it varied a bit. Italy was rotated only 6 degrees, while the Black Sea was rotated up to 8.8 degrees. That suggested the mapmaker created the chart using different observations made at different times. The result “highlights one of the most interesting problems that historical cartographers faced,” says Hessler. How did the mapmaker decide which records to draw on? “Faced with all this data from different places and times, how did they know what was more accurate?” he adds.
Hessler analyzed other portolan charts in the same way, and each time, the correspondence with his book’s predictions was nearly exact. Between 1300 and 1350, the declination in the Mediterranean fell by 2 degrees — and in keeping with that change, portolan charts drawn by the end of that period were about 2 degrees less rotated. By 1500, declination was back at 8.5 degrees, and so were most of the charts Hessler examined. Over the next 150 years, the declination shifted again, to 11 degrees, and the rotation of the charts followed suit. 
To track how portolan charts’ accuracy changed over time, Hessler drew again on the methods he used to quantify butterflies’ evolutionary relationships. As with the butterflies’ wings, he imagined each chart drawn on a metal plate and simulated bending it to move the landmarks on the medieval chart to meet their locations on a modern map. The less energy required to distort the metal into the new shape, the more accurate the chart. 
Curiously, he found, in the first several decades after the first portolan chart was drawn, subsequent charts’ accuracy declined a bit. Hessler speculates that the first portolan mapmaker’s technique spread quickly, but those who adopted his methods initially lacked his skill, so their efforts were less precise. As mapmakers’ skills steadily improved over the next two and a half centuries, so did the accuracy of their maps.
Across the Atlantic
As he pieced together answers to some of the questions that had vexed historians, Hessler says, “So many things amazed me: how much mapmakers of early portolan charts knew, how they updated their data so quickly, how accurate their compasses were, how geographic information flowed around the world in ways that we don’t understand.” 
Portolan charts paved the way for the age of exploration. Now, sailors could travel down the coast of Africa and around the cape. Eventually, maps were made that extended across the Atlantic to the New World. But paradoxically, the age of exploration that followed the creation of the portolan charts eventually led to their downfall, as increasingly sophisticated techniques of shipbuilding and mapmaking made them obsolete.
The problem was the portolan mapmakers’ lack of a systematic way of reducing the spherical Earth to a flat map. That was of little consequence for short journeys but mattered much more when sailing longer distances. In 1569, the Belgian geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator created his method for presenting a spherical world on a flat map, the one familiar to us today. This mapmaking technique, though it stretched and compressed landmarks and distances between them, had the great advantage that a straight compass course was represented by a straight line on the map. 
Mercator’s projections began to be used to sail the open seas by the early 1800s, by which time portolan charts had pretty much disappeared. But their importance is undeniable. “The development of these maps revolutionized how people perceived space, much like Google Earth has done in our lifetimes,” Hessler says. “Understanding how the technology was developed gives us insight into how we got here, and perhaps into where we’re going.”

colored-map
This depiction of the world as Ptolemy knew it, published in a 1482 edition of Geographia, was printed from carved wood blocks. Any maps Ptolemy himself created have been lost, but later scholars created maps based on his information.
Hain Collection , Library of Congress Geography and Map Division
16th-century-portolan
This 16th-century portolan chart of the Mediterranean is vastly more accurate than any Ptolemaic map. Designed for marine navigation, the chart includes labeled seaports, giving the coastline a fuzzy appearance.
Library of Congress Geography and Map Division
1797-portolan-chart
This 1797 chart uses a Mercator projection. Devised by Gerardus Mercator in 1569, these projections, with their perpendicular lines of latitude and longitude, dominated nautical cartography by the 1800s. 
Library of Congress Geography and Map Division
Mapping the World
The second-century Greek mathematician, astronomer and geographer Claudius Ptolemy founded the Western science of cartography.
From his study in Alexandria, Ptolemy assigned coordinates of latitude and longitude to 8,000 geographic locations, compiling the information into his Geographia, an atlas of world geography that included colored maps depicting regions of the then-known world.
Although Ptolemy’s data were inaccurate, his work (translated into Latin in the early 1400s) influenced cartographers and explorers more than a millennium after Geographia’s publication.
[This article originally appeared in print as "The Mapmaker's Mystery."]

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Visual Art in Arabic Calligraphy

Arabic Printing and the Alphabet


The Arabs gave to a large part of the world not only a religion - Islam - but also a language and an alphabet. Where the Muslim religion went, the Arabic language and Arabic writing also went. Arabic became and has remained the national language - the mother tongue - of North Africa and all the Arab countries of the Middle East.

Even where Arabic did not become the national language, it became the language of religion wherever Islam became established, since the Quran is written in Arabic, the Profession of Faith is to be spoken in Arabic, and five times daily the practicing Muslim must say prayers in Arabic. Today, therefore, one can hear Arabic spoken - at least for religious purposes - from Mauritania on the Atlantic, across Africa and most of Asia, and as far east as Indonesia and the Philippines. Even in China (which has a Muslim population of some forty million) and the Central Asian republics of the CIS (ex-USSR), Arabic can be heard in the shahadah, in prayer, and in the chanting of the Quran.

Of those people who embraced Islam but did not adopt Arabic as their everyday language, many millions have taken the Arabic alphabet for their own, so that today one sees the Arabic script used to write languages that have no basic etymological connection with Arabic. The languages of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are all written in the Arabic alphabet, as was the language of Turkey until some fifty years ago. It is also used in Kashmir and in some places in the Malay Peninsula and the East Indies, and in Africa it is used in Somalia and down the east coast as far south as Tanzania.



The basmalah ("In the name of God the Merciful the Compassionate"
is the opening words of the Quran). Done in an elaborate thuluth
script with the letters joined so that the entire phrase is written
without lifting the pen from the paper


It is generally accepted that the Arabic alphabet developed from the script used for Nabataean, a dialect of Aramaic used in northern Arabia and what is now Jordan during roughly the thousand years before the start of the Islamic era. It seems apparent that Syriac also had some influence on its development. The earliest inscription that has been found that is identifiably Arabic is one in Sinai that dates from about A.D. 300. Another Semitic script which was in use at about the same time and which is found on inscriptions in southern Arabia is the origin of the alphabet now used for Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia.

The Arabic alphabet has twenty-eight letters (additional letters have been added to serve the needs of non-Arabic languages that use the Arabic script, such as those of Iran and Pakistan), and each of the letters may have up to four different forms. All of the letters are strictly speaking consonants, and unlike the Roman alphabet used for English and most European languages Arabic writing goes from right to left.

Another basmalah in ornamental thuluth script
is written in the shape of an oval
Another significant difference is that the Arabic script has been used much more extensively for decoration and as a means of artistic expression. This is not to say that the Roman alphabet (and others such as the Chinese and Japanese, for instance) are not just as decorative and have not been used just as imaginatively. Since the invention of printing from type, however, calligraphy (which means, literally "beautiful writing") has come to be used in English and the other European languages only for special documents and on special occasions and has declined to the status of a relatively minor art.

In the countries that use the Arabic alphabet, on the other hand, calligraphy has continued to be used not only on important documents but for a variety of other artistic purposes as well. One reason is that the cursive nature of the Arabic script and certain of its other peculiarities made its adaptation to printing difficult and delayed the introduction of the printing press, so that the Arab world continued for some centuries after the time of Gutenberg to rely on handwriting for the production of books (especially the Quran) and of legal and other documents. The use of Arabic script has therefore tended to develop in the direction of calligraphy and the development of artistically pleasing forms of hand lettering, while in the West the trend has been toward printing and the development of ornamental and sometimes elaborate type faces.

Another and perhaps more important reason was a religious one. The Quran nowhere prohibits the representation of humans or animals in drawings, or paintings, but as Islam expanded in its early years it inherited some of the prejudices against visual art of this kind that had already taken root in the Middle East. In addition, the early Muslims tended to oppose figural art (and in some cases all art) as distracting the community from the worship of God and hostile to the strictly unitarian religion preached by Muhammad, and all four of the schools of Islamic law banned the use of images and, declared that the painter of animate figures would be damned on the Day of Judgment. Wherever artistic ornamentation and decoration were required, therefore, Muslim artists, forbidden to depict, human or animal forms, for the most part were forced to resort either to what has since come to be known as "arabesque" (designs based on strictly geometrical forms or patterns of leaves and flowers) or, very often, to calligraphy. Arabic calligraphy therefore came to be used not only in producing copies of the Quran (its first and for many centuries its most important use), but also for all kinds of other artistic purposes as well on porcelain and metalware, for carpets and other textiles, on coins, and as architectural ornament (primarily on mosques and tombs but also, especially in later years, on other buildings as well).


The basmalah is here written in ornamental "floriated"
kufic (above) and in naskhi (below)

At the start of the Islamic era two types of script seem to have been in use - both derived from different forms of the Nabataean, alphabet. One was square and angular and was called kufic (after the town of Kufa in Iraq, though it was in use well before the town was founded). It was used for the first, handwritten copies of the Quran, and for architectural decoration in the earliest years of the Islamic Empire. The other, called naskhi, was more rounded and cursive and was used for letters, business documents, and wherever speed rather than elaborate formalism was needed. By the twelfth century kufic was obsolete as a working script except for special uses and in northwest Africa, where it developed into the maghribi style of writing still used in the area today. Naskhi, the rounded script, remained in use and from it most of the many later styles of Arabic calligraphy have been developed.


The ruq'ah script is used for headlines and titles and is
the everyday written script of most of the Arab world


Calligraphy flourished during the Umayyad era in Damascus. During this period scribes began the modification of the original thick and heavy kufic script into the form employed today for decorative purposes, as well as developing a number of new scripts derived from the more cursive naskhi. It was under the 'Abbasids, however, that calligraphy first began to be systematized.

In the first half of the tenth century the 'Abbasid vizier Ibn Muqlah completed the development of kufic, established some of the rules of shape and proportion that have been followed by calligraphers since his time, and was first to develop what became the traditional classification of Arabic writing into the "six styles" of cursive script:

  • naskhi - from which most present day printing types are derived
  • thuluth - a more cursive outgrowth of naskhi
  • rayhani - a more ornate version of thuluth
  • muhaqqaq - a bold script with sweeping diagonal flourishes)
  • tawqi' - a somewhat compressed variety of thuluth in which all the letters are sometimes joined to each other
  • ruq'ah - the style commonly used today for ordinary handwriting in most of the Arab world

It was from these six, and from kufic, that later calligraphers, not only in the Arab world but in Iran, Turkey, and elsewhere as well, developed and elaborated other scripts.


The graceful Persian ta'liq script is used in a sentence which starts
"Beauty is a spell which casts its splendor upon the universe..."


In Iran, for example, there came into use a particularly graceful and delicate script called ta'liq, in which the horizontal strokes of the letters are elongated and which is often written at an angle across the page. From ta'liq, in turn, another script called nasta'liq was derived which combines the Arabic naskhi and the Persian tailiq into a beautifully light and legible script.


The diwani script (top) and the so called "royal" diwani (below)
 were developed by Ottoman calligraphers for use on state docu


It was in Ottoman Turkey, however, that calligraphy attained the highest development once the early creative flowering had faded elsewhere in the Middle East. So renowned were Ottoman calligraphers, in fact, that a popular saying was that "The Quran was revealed in Mecca, recited in Egypt, and written in Istanbul." The Ottomans were not content merely to improve and develop the types of script that they inherited from the Arabs and Persians but also added a number of new styles to the calligrapher's repertoire.

One important addition by the Ottoman calligraphers was the script called diwani, so called from the word diwan (meaning state council or government office) since it was at first used primarily for documents issued by the Ottoman Council of State. It is an extremely graceful and very decorative script, with strong diagonal flourishes, though less easy to read than some other styles. After its development in Turkey, it spread to the Arab countries and is in use today for formal documents and also as architectural decoration.


This tughra (monogram or insignia)  of the
Ottoman Sultan Abdu Hamid shows the three
elongated vertical strokes which are
characteristic of this style


Examples of more or less standard types of script such as these do not by any means exhaust the number of styles. Islamic calligraphers have experimented endlessly and have been extremely imaginative. Another distinctive Turkish contribution is the tughra, an elaborate and highly stylized rendering of the names of the Ottoman sultan, originally used to authenticate imperial decrees. The tughra later came to be used both in Turkey and by rulers of t the Arab countries as a kind of royal insignia or emblem, on coins and stamps and wherever a coat of arms or royal monogram would be used by European governments.


In the muthanna or "doubled" style of calligraphy
shown on the left each half of the design is a mirror image
of the other. The basmalah in the thuluth script on the
right has been written in the shape of an ostrich


Another unusual variation of calligraphy, not often used nowadays, is the style called muthanna (Arabic for "doubled"). This is not really a type of script in itself but consists of a text in one of the standard scripts such as naskhi worked into a pattern in which one half is a mirror image of the other. Even more imaginative is what may be called pictorial calligraphy, in which the text (usually the profession of faith, a verse from the Quran, or some other e phrase with religious significance) is written in the shape of a bird, animal, tree, boat, or other object. A Quranic verse in the kufic script, for example, may be written so that it forms the picture of a mosque and minarets.


The angular kufic script is here used to put a
well known religious expression into the form
of a mosque with four minarets


The art of calligraphy is still very much alive in the Arab world and wherever the Arabic alphabet is used. The list of everyday uses is almost endless: coins and paper money bear the work of expert calligraphers, wall posters and advertising signs in every town show the calligrapher's art, as do the cover and title page of every book, and the major headlines in every newspaper and magazine have been written by hand. Calligraphy - the art of "beautiful writing" -continues to be something that is not only highly prized as ornament and decoration but is immensely practical and useful as well.




Photo: Preeminent among artists of the Muslim world is the calligrapher,
as it is his privilege to adorn the word of God.
Here, ornamental kufic is used on a Quranic page that typifies
the marriage of calligraphy and illumination,
an art that reached its zenith in the fourteenth century




Photo: Cursive script on a section of gold-embroidered kiswah,
the black cloth covering of the Ka'bah,
which is renewed each year at the time of the pilgrimage




Photo: Miniature from the Shah-Nameh (Book of Kings)
illustrating the epic of Persian poet Firdausi




Photo: The cursive script shown in detail
from a fourteenth-century Persian tile




Photo: A fourteenth-century manuscript of a pharmaceutical text




Photo: Cursive script on Quran stand of wood, dated 1360,
a fine example of Mongol art from western Turkestan



Wednesday, October 19, 2011

What is Visual Poetry?

Easter Wings by George Herbert


Definition of CALLIGRAM

: a design in which the letters of a word (as a name) are rearranged so as to form a decorative pattern or figure (as for a seal) — compare monogram

From Wikipedia

A calligram is a poem, phrase, or word in which the typeface, calligraphy or handwriting is arranged in a way that creates a visual image. The image created by the words expresses visually what the word, or words, say. In a poem, it manifests visually the theme presented by the text of the poem. Guillaume Apollinaire was a famous calligram writer and author of a book of poems called Calligrammes. His poem written in the form of the Eiffel Tower is an example of a calligram.


EARLY VISUAL POETRY

Famous Calligrammes, by Apollinaire

Calligrammes, subtitled Poems of war and peace 1913-1916, is a collection of poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, and was first published in 1918 (see 1918 in poetry). Calligrammes is noted for how the typeface and spatial arrangement of the words on a page plays just as much of a role in the meaning of each poem as the words themselves - a form called a calligram. In this sense, the collection can be seen as either concrete poetry or visual poetry. Apollinaire described his work as follows:

The Calligrammes are an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph.

                             - Guillaume Apollinaire, in a letter to André Billy


Calligrammes by Apollinaire -

http://www.google.com/search?q=apollinaire+calligrammes&hl=en&qscrl=1&nord=1&rlz=1T4ADRA_enUS421US423&biw=1539&bih=822&site=webhp&prmd=imvnsb&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=7SafTtlAg-SIAu_BhYYB&sqi=2&ved=0CCAQsAQ


Apollinaire’s most celebrated Calligrammes






























CONTEMPORARY VISUAL POETRY

Peter Ciccariello’s “Credible report III”

Image by [Peter Ciccariello’s](http://invisiblenotes.blogspot.com/) “Credible report III”

Visual Poetry

Visual poetry (also called VisPo and concrete poetry) is poetry in which the visual element is as important—or sometimes more important—than the verbal one. It’s meant to be seen. All poetry has a visual component, but visual poetry self-consciously emphasizes and exploits images in the creation of meaning. To many, these poems are not just literary works, but works of art.

While some claim that visual poetry has existed since humanity’s first use of writing, many see its modern Western beginnings either in 1896 with Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés or around 1914 with the work of Guillaume Apollinaire and Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti.

Visual poetry experienced a renaissance in the 1950s and 1960s on the European continent and in Brazil with the movement known as concrete poetry.

Eugen Gomringer, “Wind”

Haroldo de Campos, “Nasce Morre”

Throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s—and afterwards—people also created poetry incorporating more complex pictures. Some labeled it “visual poetry” as a category distinct from concrete poetry. How concrete and visual poetry are classified and related to each other is still open to debate.

Carol Stetser, “Hierogram”

K.S. Ernst and Sheila Murphy, “Vortextique”


Today many visual poets have incorporated sound and motion in their poetry: http://vispo.com/

Visual poetry takes a variety of forms. The genre has an elasticity that leads to ever-widening avenues for creation of meaning. The links to the poets here give are just a tiny taste of its rich world.


More Visual Poetry Images -

L'oiseau_et_le_bouquet

Caligrafia_arabe_pajaro_svg


Bismillah


Figurengedicht_1638



Heinritzh Sales voir son site


ebon heath: on visual poetry
DateSunday, May 24, 2009 at 9:33AM

Ebon Heath is a Brooklyn-based artist/graphic designer with a love of typography and an interest in giving a dynamic, three-dimensional and physical representation to all the "visual noise" that permeates everyday city life. His work is very much influenced by hip hop. Both lyrically and rhythmically. He sees the work as a way to "cleanse or release content contained inside us."

His work honors *craft* in a heavily digital world. I love the statement he is making. And what a gorgeous statement it is.

Read the article on Yatzer to learn more.

Ebon Heath
http://www.yatzer.com/1690_ebon_heath_and_his_visual_poetry



Ebon Heath
http://www.yatzer.com/1690_ebon_heath_and_his_visual_poetry



Ebon Heath
http://www.yatzer.com/1690_ebon_heath_and_his_visual_poetry


The popular song goes that words don’t come easy, and, ironically enough, this is exactly the sense one has when trying to express himself in front of Ebon Heath’s typographic mobiles. Heath is one of the most promising artists of the moment and his take on typography is pure visual poetry. Words never looked more astonishing, they form their own structures in a short of a rebellion, they dance and move and yet they stand still. In Heath’s universe, words go out of their suffocating homes, they become alive and they tell us their amazing stories.



Ebon Heath
http://www.yatzer.com/1690_ebon_heath_and_his_visual_poetry



ADVERTISEMENTS, BULLETINS, PLAY BILLS AS VISUAL POETRY






mix of calligrams (calligramme, calligramma) by Laura Ruggeri ©1995-2005




Mathematical Masterpieces: Making Art From Equations

Artists use math to create works of art to rival gallery masterpieces.

Bunny-Squared

This is a self-referential bunny — a sculpture of a bunny, the surface of which is tiled by 72 copies of the word "Bunny." This piece is part of a larger series of "autologlyphs," following on from HS's "Sphere Autologlyph" from the 2010 Bridges art exhibition. An autologlyph is a word written or represented in a way which is described by the word itself. This style of autologlyph combines Escher-style tessellation with typographical ideas related to ambigrams.

The bunny was created using a technique published by CSK for transferring a symmetric design to a suitably parameterized mesh surface. We modified the technique to require a quarter as many copies of the fundamental domain as compared with the original version. This allowed us to send a smaller (and more affordable) model to the 3D printer. The design of the word "Bunny" was produced using Adobe Illustrator, then thickened in 2D, triangulated, mapped to the 3D surface, and extruded into a thin shell for manufacture.

“Bunny” Bunny by Craig S. Kaplan and Henry Segerman. Plastic, Selective-Laser-Sintered.