Haj Ross, University of North Texas

The Shape of Meaning

This talk aims to demonstrate that one option that poets have to make their words sink deep into us is to use the fact that poetry is placed language and to create certain alignments of related elements in poems in such a way that these elements speak to our eyes - they make visual sense. In other words, a poet may choose to locate the words of a poem in such a way that words which are either conceptually, or visually, or phonetically similar form a small number of simple geometric forms in the printed poem. These alignings, which I refer to as corridors, are most of-ten straight lines, but I have found some poems in which there seems to be evidence for some simple curved corridors, and one poem in which I believe it can be argued that an ellipse formed by the repetitions of the poem's most frequent word should be taken to indicate that even simple closed forms may be used as corridors. The work is in initial stages, and evidence is hard to come by, but I believe that persuasive corridors can be proposed for poems in at least English, Spanish and Portuguese.