Poetry on the Road For all its assumed freedoms, poetry has remained a bastion of strict rules that, perhaps ironically, govern the creation of some of our global culture’s most ethereal and elegant verbal constructs. Rhythmic structure in the form of meter, like the popular iambic pentameter, or Japanese haiku with its rigid count of five, seven, and five again, are examples of how sound is organized to influence meaning and emotion. So it’s only fitting that, each year since 2002, graphic designer Boris Müller has used his own mathematical structures to reorganize poems into a visual identity for Poetry on the Road, an international literature festival held in Bremen, Germany. In 2006, Müller assigned a number to every letter in the alphabet so that, added together, each word in a poem had a specific value. He then graphed each poem by word in numerical order as points along a circular path. Simple rings were applied around each point to denote how many words within a poem shared that specific cumulative value, thicker rings representing more common word counts. Softly curving lines add a graceful, dare we say even poetic, element and connect each word in the order they were originally written by the poet. The result is a swirling and dynamic visualization that considers the artistic entropy of a purely inventive enterprise while also recognizing how invisible structures can be made visible.
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