Poet Dan Waber at a podium before a projector screen.
Text on projector, The Fat Line between the visual and the textual.
Text, Waves lapping against a shore, line break, Waves lapping against a shore, by Bronek Konarski. The W's at the beginnings of each line make the line look like a wave lapping against a shore.
An illegible block of text.
The poem "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r" by E E Cummings appears on the projector. Its text is arranged in a chaotic way that reflects the energy of a grasshopper leaping. The text is not altogether coherent linguistically, but it more or less reads, "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-h-r, who, as we look up now gathering into a leap -- P-P-E-G-O-R-H-R-A-S-S -- arriving to become grasshopper." The poem's phrases are sometimes split up by other textual elements, including some that are purely visual.
An arrangement of text in a chaotic somewhat splattering, swirling and descending pattern. Some of the text is bold and large, some is tiny and thin, and there is much in between these two ends of the spectrum. Most of the text is gibberish -- for example, a word spelled S C R A B R R R R R A A N N G along the top. Some are actual words in Italian, such as esplosione and futurista. Among the text are text-like symbols.
A blue background with illegible black text. The text is sparsely arranged, almost resembling a minimal book cover.
A black background with swirls of orange.
A menu with a black background and swirls of orange.
Various letters appear but then swirl into odd shapes. It appears that the app lets you take a letter and then draw with it, the result being that the drawing may have faint echoes of text but does not exactly resemble text itself.
A poem arranged in a sweeping, arc-like pattern.
The word cheer appears. The C, H, and R are all arranged the way text in a word normally would be. But the two E's bounce upward, several more E's spiraling up and away, becoming smaller and smaller until they stop.
An illegible poem comprised of one word that appears to be unreadable gibberish.
A poem comprised of two stanzas with very short lines, the last line being just one word.
The Donald Finkel poem again.
An illegible block of text.
We move in on the projector and now can read it better. The poem they are discussing that starts out "Roses are red" is by Albert W. Conrad.
Text, Terza Rima #6, a quadruple acrostic, by Dan Waber -- one plus one makes one one plus one makes two to live two live lives tied twisted twogether (spelled like the number two, then gether) his heartbeats spastic her mouth defines kiss each kiss crisp stanza ends with rhyme's echo reins and rings and up right stand the silent laughtears fall on the soft cheek of her sigh once the question that answered was her voice verse after verse with lines and lies we play each of us played once or twice in the flames roads less travailed I nailed our hearts as a silver sheathed hammer expound pounds the way