branching

This post is a bit of an experiment! The idea had a couple of starting points…

I was looking at some Lady’s mantle flowers in bright sunshine. This started off a chain of thought which had a lot to do with the process of branching – how we see it in natural growth, echoed in man-made patterns, and also in mathematics.

Not long after I read about a free piece of software for game developers called Ink. This is a lightweight tool aimed at authors writing stories where the reader gets to make choices. Ink is made by an award winning Cambridge based game development company called inkle. If you’re interested you can find out more about the company and download ink software from their website.

I decided to try to make an interactive poem, where your choices can affect the flow of the poem. To begin with I chose something quite simple, and fairly structured.  I wrote three short threads of poetry about my Lady’s mantle ideas, then developed a page using Ink that allows you to choose how the poem branches as you read. So in the end I had a poem about branching … that could actually branch!

I’m not able to embed the resulting poem here on the blog, but I can host it on my website, so I’m going to add a link to show it in a new window, but if you’d like to come back here and like this, and/or leave a comment about it, I’d love to hear from you…

Click to open a new window with the interactive poem ‘Branching’

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Leaf

A visual poem for National Poetry Day, and for autumn…

 

Yellow Rose

My third colour poem makes the triad of painter’s primaries. It takes its starting point from a lively tune I remember from the radio when I was a small boy. Of course I didn’t know then that the origins of the song went back over a hundred years earlier, or what the lyrics were about.

White heart

This poem was written after I saw a picture of a ‘ghost heart’. This is a kind of ‘protein scaffold’ in researchers hope to be able use to grow a new human heart which will not have problems with rejection by the recipient’s immune system. It’s a remarkable image, I found it at once beautiful, hopeful, and troubling. (more about ‘ghost hearts’…)

rejection

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Delicate snowball cradled in latex,

Grotesque confectionary beauty,

Like a glass seed distilled from haar frost,

A harvested death, still unprimed for life.

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Wrapped in an eastern widow’s veil,

A bridal chalice engraved with loss,

Gently cupped with gloved competence,

A denatured vessel etched in air.

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Reborn, bloody, swollen and restarted,

Will this pale ornament seem quite so fine?

Bonny is as bonny dances, pressing

By hot and ruddy, stealing heat from stone.

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The image cusps our movement in-between,

Risky hopes drawn from disembodied flesh.

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Whiteout

Land’s stationary surface
Squeaking like meringue
To grip my marks,
Becomes a sudden sky.

I sense the edge.
I can’t see it,
But my stomach gives
A predictive lurch.

Ahead an uncreased page
Sweeps away, her seamless
Laid quite unperturbed
By marginal horizons.

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Spring remembered at the changing of the clocks

A small plane eases set square perpendicular,

Skylarks bob and descant chorus,

Gorse spikes buttery by the broom’s lemon yellow,

Sun hazed scenting coconut,

Save these richer, richest, riches –

Keep safe this warmer wealth of light.

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Shameless…

… self promotion, I know. Apologies – normal service will be resumed soon!  But, just a quick post to say that there are now less than 24 hours left to vote at Stanza Digital Slam 2014 (my entry is ‘Butterfly Mind in Blue’ )