Friday, March 5, 2010

Poem annotations browser for International Day of Poetry: March 21

The usual thought is to take a generic browser and add a plugin so as to have a useful feature such as an annotation.  So you do that on your research PC.
Now you are sitting at the airport with your iPad.  Oops, that was a Firefox plugin and this is Safari (your annotation content wouldn't have been accessible to you on the web anyway ...)

If there is a poet who demands annotations it must be the author of these lines:
And then went down to the ship
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.

These lines, thus far, could be in HTML as ASCII text (although the font was to be something other than Monotype Bembo - which even this is not.)

Oh - this is not from Derek Walcott's Omeros.

But the poet in question sometimes included Chinese characters  and classical Greek in his poems ...

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