post the fifthteenth // poem visualization

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The concept of my final piece was to emphasize the “loneliness” and isolation described in ee cummings’ poem, “(a leaf falls) loneliness”. cummings’ poems are characterized by short, broken up words and phrases, usually ignoring traditional rules of grammar and punctuation. As such, the book is meant to mirror his writing’s style, by being very simple and minimalist in terms of the book’s design and look. Each page is completely black, with white text and a small white picture accompanying each line. These pictures are a falling leaf (a literal representation of the poem’s subject), whose pattern of movement mirrors the visual movement of the letters it accompanies, and a man in the bottom-right corner, who attempts to catch the leaf, but decides instead to turn away and leave the panel. The man is intended to be lonely and isolated in this space, a fact that is emphasized by his being a silhouette. The drawings were sketched in photoshop and traced in illustrator in order to create a cleaner and simpler look. The text used was Trebuchet MS.

The book was created by printing the pages on a textured paper through a wide-format printer, which was then cut out and fixed to black matboard using a spray adhesive. The biggest difficulty came afterwards, in the binding, where I had to punch holes in each (now very thick) page, and then use two key rings to put them all together. The rings were difficult to work with, but I managed to get them through each hole without any damage. This binding was also important to the book’s meaning, as the rings are one of the simplest methods of binding, which goes along with the book’s overall simplicity, as per cummings’ work.