A Piece
by Jon Ståle Ritland
It was by coincidence that I met Dutch visual artist Michiel Koelink in St. Andrews in 2012, just when a couple of my poems from the collection Body Searches were exhibited at the Scottish poetry festival Stanza. Koelink, who had developed a computer program designed to show words and sentences in 3D, asked for permission to type up a poem of mine in his project. What was revealed on the screen was a three dimensional, moving poem, structured like a molecule. In the original version, the poems from Body Searches were set up in a way inspired by the double stranded DNA-molecule, written in a way that offered multiple possible readings; horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. Watching my poem move around on the screen on Koelink’s computer, I was struck by how perfectly the form fitted the poem.
As the collaboration progressed and Koelink adjusted in the software, more poems from Body Searches were presented through the program, which Koelink had named The PoetryMachine. These poems were later exhibited in Agora, Berlin in 2013, at Oslo International Poetry Festival in 2014, and again in Stanza in 2015.
The process inspired us to develop an editorial program where you could write poems in three dimensions directly on the screen. We kept asking ourselves: How does poetry function in three dimensions? What are the formal, structural, rhetoric, stylistic and poetic possibilities offered by writing in three dimensions? How does the working process unfold if you can position words in a three-dimensional space, and see the three-dimensional structure take shape while writing? What kinds of poems are produced? And how are they different from poems that are written in two dimensions? Might it result in new ways of thinking about poetry?
David Jones, a Portuguese computer science engineer and media artist, and educator on the fields of creative coding and game development, got involved, and the collaboration resulted in the development of 3D Poetry Editor (3DPoetryEditor.art). 3D Poetry Editor is a text editor for composing poems in three dimensions, using three-dimensional structures, and can also be used to read and distribute three-dimensional poems.
For the project, supported by Nederlands Letterenfonds Dutch Foundation for Literature, fourteen international poets were invited to write a poem each, to be presented at Poetry International Rotterdam in 2017. The project premiered with the title The Gravity of Words, and the poets participating were Amy Catanzano, Adam Dickinson, Sampurna Chattarji, Maria Malinovskaya, Derek Beaulieu, Morten Søndergaard, Mani Rao, Nils Christian Moe-Repstad, Laura Accerboni, Angela Rawlings, Jan Baeke, Daniel Dee, Mamta Sagar, and myself.
This poem, Diamond/Diamant, was my contribution to The Gravity of Words. The poem itself mimics the atomic structure of a carbon atom by creating four connections to every line in the poem. The strings connecting the lines made a shape on the macroscopic level that resembles the surface of a diamond.
After writing Diamond/Diamant I continued to write poems inspired by the carbon atom and in 2019 my collection of poetry Karbonforbindelser (Carbon Compounds) was published. Working with the 3D Poetry Editor led to new discoveries of the possibilities in writing and reading poetry and gave freedom to consider what a poem might be. Exploring writing from a structural, visual angle, can make you think differently about poetry itself, and in my case, using molecular forms led me to writing poems that I otherwise would not have thought of.
About the artist
Jon Ståle Ritland (b. 1968 in Drammen, Norway) is a poet and ophthalmologist, living in Ålesund. His first collection of poetry, Kroppsvisitasjoner (Aschehoug, 2004), was translated to English as [Body Searches] and published by Broken Dimanche Press in 2013. He has published four other poetry collections. His poems are often inspired by natural science and have been translated to Swedish, Hungarian, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, English and Romanian. Ritland has been reading his poems at several festivals the later years, often in collaboration with the jazz-musicians Nils Petter Molvær and Steinar Raknes. His collection of tennis poems, Orbiting the Yellow Ball, was published by Sampson Low in 2019.
Images (from the top)
Still from Diamant (2017)
Diamant (2017) (video)
pp. 12-13, Body Searches, Broken Dimanche Press (2013)
