A Classic Poetic Move to a Modern Inquiry

A shape poem is created using a visual representation to enhance the meaning of the poem. Theses images become concrete or a fixed idea. This poetic form dates back to ancient Greece in the Simmias of Rhodes. https://www.theoi.com/Text/PatternPoems.html Then again, shape poetry from the Renaissance symbolized religious beliefs that differed from the early Greek wing-poetry. https://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/Easterwings.html The mid-century modern poetic writing from the twentieth century explored the shape poem through ideograms. This is not to be confused with alphabetic symbols or hieroglyphics. The symbology in concrete shape poetry relates to the meaning of the poem where words are ideograms. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40116875 Finally, there are poets like myself that are developing shape poems today.

This is how AI imagined a shape poem of a rose. This poem was created for inquiry about modern shape poems.

The first shape poem I wrote was through emotional feeling. I wrote a poem explaining love without trying to make a shape in college during the year 2021. My poetry professor then reflected on this poem and complimented me on the shape. Later, I started thinking of the shape a poem would make if a person could speak to a computer. I imagined Alice from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland speaking to a computer in code. My college classmates were interested in this idea as it appeared new to them in the year 2021. The next shape poem I wrote was a revised form of my original poem that I wrote only two years later. The wording changed in that poem, reflecting my idea of self-growth during the year 2024. I also revisited my computer communication poem under a dystopian genre titled "Fear." This poem also written in the year 2024 incorporated imagery and Edgar Allan Poe's raven. I wrote a few shape poems since then and now have been studying AI's idea of a shape poem to compare to my own experience with shape poems. I am currently writing an academic paper on this subject that I want to publish.

This is an AI example of a rose as a shape poem in a particular style comparative to surrealism. This art was created for inquiry to be included in an academic paper.