Mission of the Blog

Welcome

Thank you for visiting my blog! I hope you enjoy perusing the poems published here.

Purpose

This blog has been created to explore the possibilities that exist within the English language to layer words, meaning and narrative in poetry. The primary inspiration for the blog name comes from the music term "fugue," where two or more musical voices explore a melodic idea. For the uninitiated, singing "Row Row Row Your Boat" in a round meets the basic definition of a fugue. In the author's biased opinion, Bach's "Little Fugue in G Minor" is the quintessential version of the form.

Another medium that has influenced the creation of this blog is film. Specifically, Stanley Kubrick's filmography contains many examples of layered visual narrative, though Kubrick would often subvert the primary narrative of his films through visual subtext. Rather than subverting the primary line of verse, my goal is to enhance it through layered subtext. 

Of course, I would be remiss not to mention the use of equidistant letter spacing within the original Biblical texts, as outlined by scholars such as Ivan Panin. However, the level of complexity within such coding exceeds anything being explored here. 

Product

However, you may wonder as to what is being created? I have coined the term "fugue poem" to describe the style of verse that I am developing. Essentially, equidistant letter spacing is being used to layer multiple phrases within poetic verse. 

Example

Let's start with the term "GOOD." Our purpose will be to connect a word or phrase with "GOOD," using spacing between the letters of the original word. For this example, we will use single spaces between each letter. 

"G_O_O_D"

By filling in the following letters into the spaces, we get the following phrase. 

"GROWOLD" or "GROW OLD." 

Both words are now thematically linked together. Were we to pursue this connection further in writing a poem, we could add spaces between each of the letters in "GROW OLD" and go from there. 

Format

Each poem will be published with the poem title as the blog entry title. The main body of the post will include both the verse of the poem, as well as the encoded text.

Because the letter sequences within the main text do not follow the same syntax as the verse, all poems will be published in ALL CAPS. This will hopefully reduce any confusion as to the sequencing contained within each of the poems.

Any punctuation marks, such as commas or apostrophes, are not counted for spacing purposes.