Monday, March 22, 2010

Schwitters' Gesetztes Bildgedicht in a Japanese variant

Using the Curl browser plugin you can view this Japanese version of Kurt Schwitters' "Gesetztes Bildgedicht".

The selection of UNICODE Hiragana alternatives is my own.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Paul Valéry "Le Cimetière marin" (1920) as a simple Curl {pre } block

Over at the aule-browser site I have placed a simple example of a French poem (Paul Valéry "Le Cimetière marin") in a bare Curl {pre } block with a {paragraph } format on a Curl DefaultDocument page.

The Curl browser plugin is required to view the poem.

The Curl page itself contains the poem - it is not loaded as a selectable resource - and the page is locked in as UNICODE utf-8.

Copy via "copy-paste select" has not been disabled - which is problematic as the poem is in public domain in Canada but may be under copyright in the jurisdiction from which the page visitor is browsing.

As it stands, the poem is not presented so as to allow an "in-place" bilingual translation comparison stanza by stanza let alone a comparison of translations.  A look-up lexicon is also not available as part of the page - say, by dbl-click on a word or line.

As it stands, no "in-page" annotations have been enabled.

There is a more complete presentation of the poem in Curl markup at the HTML home page for poets.aule-browser.com where several poets are featured.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Kurt Schwitters' "Gesetztes Bildgedicht" in Curl

Over at the aule-browser site I have two Curl versions of Kurt Schwitters' 1922 visual poem.

The first is constructed of completely independent elements (excluding the enclosing frame) to facilitate an animated version.

The second is in slightly different Curl declarative style using the Curl border-spec option using instances of the BorderSpec class with each bordered internal frame.  In one instance this proved problematic and an apparently empty "frame" had to be given a right border to simulate a left border on the adjacent frame.

If you flip between the two as browser tabs you will see some minor layout variation which ideally would vanish by wrapping a contraint library (as with Alan Borning's original ThingLab.)

Other alternatives would include the use of a Curl grid or a Table or any of the above in a non-declarative or procedural style.

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 ...