Passionate Scribbly Experiments

This afternoon was perfect for writing.  Torrential downpours!  Dramatic thunderclaps!  I was working away in a Starbucks when the storm hit and it certainly did wonders for my productivity.  Equipped with photocopies of my sketches and unable to escape the coffee shop, I worked through the drafts of two new poems and then started experimenting with how I might integrate image and text on the page.

This process turned out to be a lot more difficult than I expected.  I wanted the text to look emotionally written (passionate, frenzied), yet legible.  I also wanted to break away from a straight-forward linear presentation of the poem without making the actual sequence of the poem difficult to follow.  No easy feat!  I ran into similar issues with Pax Familia when I incorporated the poem into the maze and ended up sending the poem as a separate Word document when I submitted it to ensure that the impact of the poem would not be lost.  

I still don't think I found the right balance today, but some of the results were encouraging.  The poem I wrote to accompany one of the nude females wandered into the somewhat dark subjects of sexuality and the internet, which I don't think really suits the image. It begins:

An icon in the modern sense, digitized and abbreviated 

to make room for a thousand simultaneous desires

of which your thighs can satisfy only one

My first attempt was a pretty standard, linear layout, which ensures the text is readable but isn't very visually interesting.

My second attempt was a little more all over the place. You can probably read the whole thing if you click on the image (Let's hope it doesn't end up plagiarized in a Hallmark card!).  The poem itself needs work, but there's a good base to work from.  

The second poem explores themes of heredity (one of my goals, of course!).  Definitely a work-in-progress, but at least it allowed me to practice new text/image combinations.

I like the energy of the image above, but my favourite is this one below.

After today's experimentation session, I'm debating two directions in which I could take this series:

1. I stick with a more linear presentation and make sure my writing is legible enough that no words get lost in the presentation.
2. I go totally crazy/messy/abstract, throw all order out the window, and make the text truly an integrated, overlapping part of the image.  Then, if and when I choose to submit the works to any sort of publication, I submit the image and text as two components of the same work.

I would really love some feedback on this, so if you've made it to the end of this ridiculously long post then please leave a comment about which option you like the best (or any other crazy ideas about where I could take this experiment).  I'm really hoping to have a polished idea ready for October so that I can replicate the final version as a screen print.