The project

Poëzome is the internet result of a poetry project which was organized by a number of teachers at the Xaveriuscollege in Borgerhout (Antwerp-Belgium). Starting from certain techniques during poetry lessons, students were inspired to write. Later they illustrated the poems in black & white drawings. Other students created a performance. Another group acquired the technique of producing hand-made paper, and used it later to present some poems at an exhibition.

Cyberpoetry

Then there was the idea of presenting the poems on the internet. How can you do that?

• One way is to present them as in a book, in a static way. You can then browse the poems, and read them, enjoy them.

• Or you can combine them with graphics that add to the meaning of the poem...

• Or you can make something completely new, using the new possibilities of the internet in such a way that you can only experience the poems through the internet. The medium then determines the way you experience the poem. The work of art becomes a combination of language, image, movement and time in which all elements reenforce the meaning.

Links and association

How to browse the poems? We use links to browse, but what is a link more than an association? Most of the time, the association between the link (source) and its goal is obvious on the net: you click eg on the word "news", and the page you are taken to will probably give you some new facts...
But association in poetry is more subtle, the link is (as a rule) hidden, the meaning goes deeper, very often on the level of the subconscious. So the links between the interactive poems are hidden and have to be searched. Wherever you find the link, on a word or an image, it is associated in some way with the next poem...

I use this site to have students discuss different sorts of association in class. In pairs, they browse the poems, read them, express what they like or don't like in them, look for the link, and discuss and note down the associative meaning behind the link. Then we compare the different ideas of the whole group. Working like that motivates the students, since the poems and the illustrations were created by students of the same age group.

At the end of this introduction I would like to express my admiration for the high quality level of both the poetry and the illustrations that were provided by the students!

Go to the Poëzome Homepage

Go directly to the Interactive Poems (cyberpoetry)

(Note: the poems are in the Dutch language, but even without knowing the language, a visit to the second link is worth while.)