Drafting Drafting Drafting

While the poem I have chosen to use in this project contains a number of personal experiences, I have decided to stay away from images of myself in my composition. I may use my own image at some point, but for now, I am finding other images more interesting and representative of the thoughts that come to mind when I read the text. I can't explain this feeling at the moment, so I'll think about it later, if at all.

The poem I have chosen is called "The Green Light" and I wrote it in response to an assignment I was given in an undergraduate creative writing course a few years ago. I haven't touched it since that time (Spring '05, I believe) but there are a few things about it that make it something I might want to represent visually.

First, it's structured in numbered sections, giving me the opportunity to present the reader with click-able options, allowing the poem to be read in a number of different ways - ordered, random, or something in between.

Also, there are a number of different "scenes" in this piece, and I plan to use these scenes to change my presentation, or at least I think I am going to attempt to do this. It's all a drafting process at this point. The images I post below will likely be presented in the final product one at a time, and the reader will have to touch each image to get to the next, or at least that's how I see it at this point.

But enough rambling. On to the poetry itself. First, here's the first section of the poem in text form, as I originally wrote it back in '05. Consider this small piece of the poem to be a kind of preview of a draft of an unfinished, incomplete, still-in-process, fluid, malleable, flexible work-in-progress. Is that non-committal enough?

The Green Light

1.

Sitting in a booth reading
Gatsby over bad Chinese food.
Carraway interrupted by the hiss
of a desperate single mother.
Sit down. Shut up. Eat.
Anger floats
on the aroma of heat-lamp Szechuan.
Light as steam, it
spreads to every corner.




And here is what it looks like in its present form:

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Now that I have taken a shot at turning a poem (or a piece of one, at least) into something more visual, I have to ask myself how this changes things. How does the combination of text and visual affect the ideas and experiences being discussed? Does it add to the poem, take away from it, or simply change it into something completely different? I'm going to think these things over and do a little reading. I'll have some thoughts later.