In the 90’s I thought I might create visual poems sort of in the spirit of The Homeric Hymns, not about gods but about just plain people in celebration of humanity and call these visual poem hymns. The resulting ongoing project is HUMANS: http://www.thegatesofparadise.com/humans.htm  I plan to do 200 of these visual poems. My hope is to show a glimpse of a human life so that people of today and in the future people might get a glimpse of what we our lifes were and what we did.

I have always loved the Homeric Hymns. They are a collection of ancient Greek hymns that celebrate individual gods. "Homeric" in the sense that they employ the same dactylic hexameter as the Iliad and Odyssey and are couched in the same dialect. The oldest of them were written in the 7th century BC somewhat later than Hesiod and the usually accepted date for the writing down of the Homeric epics. The hymns vary widely in length, some being as brief as three or four lines, while others are in excess of five hundred lines. The long ones comprise an invocation, praise, and narrative, sometimes quite extended. In the briefest ones, the narrative element is lacking. The thirty-three hymns praise most of the major gods of Greek mythology. Zeus. Hera. Helios. Apollo. Aphrodite. Dionysus. Hermes. et al. At least the shorter ones may have served as preludes to the recitation of epic verse at festivals by professional rhapsodes. The Hymn To Hermes is surely one of the greatest poems ever written.

Visual Poetry. The Shape Poem. Shapes tell the words what to say and words tell the shapes what to form. When I was young, I dreamt of a magic oil painting where one could overpaint over and over again on a permanent magic canvas without ever ending in mud. I dreamt of a writing where one could continuously re-draft, correct, and perfect on the same piece of invisible lined magic paper without eraser crumbs and rips and endless rewritings by hand and irretrievable losses of covered ideas. I grew up in the age of steel pen points dipped in inkwells. Electronics have made the impossible possible. Magic has once again become science. Before the computer my poems would not have been impossible to do. I might have created 20 with a roomful of kind patient 12 hour a day lead shaving linotyper monks in 200 years. My process is this. I save and pdf out almost every change as I work to save my work safely and to see what it looks like printed.

The most prevalent question I am asked about my shape poems is. Is it true that you create these visual poems in Microsoft Word? My answer is yes. I use Microsoft Word 2000 installed in WindowsXP on a PC with a Core 2 Duo processor. plus 2048 MB Ram plus a 250 gigabyte hard disc and a 20” SONY G520 color monitor. I started out in 1988 with a 286 PC with Word 1.0 in Windows 2.0 on a 10 MB hard disc with 500k Ram and a 15” B&W monitor. I have had to rewrite and reshaped my visual poems many times as I’ve had to upgrade computers and MS Word over the years. I believe this has allowed me a subtle possibility for refinement in my poems. When my poems are perfected in Word, I print my poems to Adobe Acrobat which makes .pdfs. At this point I am able to publish on the Web with .pdfs and/or publish in print from .pdfs or Word documents.

A fabulous artistic pleasure in .pdfs is the .pdf magnifying glass. I like the magnifier in pdfs very much. They are a miracle to old people like me who grew up on just plain books. Our minds got bigger and smaller but now the words do too. With the magnifying glass one may enlarge or condense the image. This allows the use of minute font sizes for buried counterpoints, etc. When the fonts are enlarged they become giant sculptural entities which have the capacity to overlap transparently or opaquely. As the reader enlarges or reduces the fonts they create a myriad of object and meaning relationships. I have used over 100 fonts and symbols out of 400 fonts and symbols available to me in my system. I am happy in my use the of the gray scale gradations and the varied colors available for fonts in Microsoft Word.

Now .pdfs can also be animation cells viewed as animations in WINDOW/FULL PAGE or they can be manually moved in VIEW/ FITPAGE by [Pg Dn].

Whenever I have shown anyone how I create shape poems they have run out of the room. They invariably explain that it disturbs them to see someone working as slowly as I do on a computer.

If you would like me to create a poem about you in HUMANS please fill out the following and return it to me at owidnazo@thegatesofparadise.com

QUESTIONNAIRE FOR HUMANS

PLEASE WRITE ANSWERS IN LESS THAN 10 WORDS EACH)

1 NAME

2 BIRTHDATE CITY COUNTRY HOSPITAL

3 FAVORITE ACTIVITY AS CHILD

4 FIRST JOB

5 WHERE MOTHER BORN

6 WHERE FATHER BORN

7 WHERE YOU LIVED AS A CHILD

8 WHAT YOU LOVED AS A CHILD

9 WHERE YOU LIVE NOW

10 WHAT YOU LOVE AS AN ADULT

11 FAVORITE ANIMAL

12 FAVORITE IDEA

13 FAVORITE OBJECT

14 HOW YOU EARN A LIVING AND WHERE

15 THE AIM OF YOUR ART

16 THE AIM OF YOUR LIFE