The late Argentinian poet Ana María Uribe (1944-2004) wrote visual poetry from the 1960s with a keen typographical eye that imbued letters with character. Her “Typoemas” are very much in the Concrete poetry tradition imbuing the typed word on the page with “verbivocovisual” energy. Her “Anipoemas” lean more towards a Lettriste tradition, imbuing statuesque letters with personification through motion. Her tools were very basic: sequencing typographic images into animated GIFs to create simple animations that breathed life into letters.
Some notable examples are the “Herd of Centaurs” and the “Shoal of Sirens” series of poems which don’t just suggest the mythical creatures seen in the letter shapes, but also give them behavior by organizing them into clusters and placing them in motion. The “Gym” series does a superb job of mapping the human body and rhythmical exercise movements onto a sequence of letters.
Overall, her “Anipoemas” are a delightful record of a visual poet’s imaginative experiments with time in digital media.
Featured in BeeHive.
