Spring Day Notation

How does one attempt to capture the experience of being out in nature, surrounded by hills, trees, flowers, grass, sky? About a century before this poem, Imagist poets took on the same challenge, using compressed language to recreate sensory experiences, usually from nature or art. William Carlos Williams’ masterful final book, Pictures from Brueghel (1962), modernized ekphrastic poetry by evoking even saccadic eye movements as one looked at a Brueghel painting in his free verse. Judy Malloy uses humble Web 1.0 tools, such as frames, font colors and sizes, background colors, and the meta refresh tag, along with tactical placement of poetic lines and precise scheduling, to insert us into a space and create a vivid landscape one image at a time.

(Source: Leonardo Flores)