writing out Emily

Yesterday I spent the day at Harvard and met a number of very interesting folks along the way. One was Zachary Sifuentes, who has written out all of the poems of Emily Dickinson and created a powerful visual effect which Zach also suggests conveys something of the sound (or at least, I guess, the idea of the sound) of Dickinson's poetry. "What does sound look like," he asks, "in Dickinson’s poetry? With their associative logic, tangential reasoning, and circuitry, Dickinson’s lines hint at a shuffling of the mind. In other words, the linear behavior of her poems is anything but linear. Instead, her lines are large flocks of starlings, or cormorants, or even sparrows, fugitive from apprehension." At Zach's web site you can see photographs of the writing on display, both close-ups and far-offs. And you can watch a video of the writing in process. Here's your link to the Complete Poems project, and be sure, while there, to explore his other works.