Centering poetry

[champagne1982]

I used to use a word processing program called Dark Room. It's a very rudimentary program. Very rudimentary. And, it turns your whole screen black and your text is a green strip in the middle with a green blinking cursor and everything.

I stopped using it, though, cuz the save feature was a little wonky, and I ended up saving over like four months of work. Ugh. It was a user error btw, but the save function WAS a little wonky, too.

And you couldn't print from it, so if that's your thing, you'd end up putting it into Word for that. I dislike word a lot.

I don't have a strong preference for any word processing tools... They're all just typing to me. I happen to use Word a lot because of the integration to other MSOffice programs. I like being able to import and export data freely between Access, Excel, Publisher, PowerPoint and Word. It's taken a year of intensive practice to be able to integrate everything to the degree that I really can count myself a professional.

There are free online tutorials for pretty much every software version you have so, even though some programs have gone the way of dinosaurs or freeware, you can learn them all well enough to be effective.

 

[The_Fool]

The comments coming from this thread are very interesting. For some, poetry is all about the rhythm and the rhyme. For others, it is about the words, the meaning, the metaphors. Some prefer to read their poetry aloud, while others ingest it silently.

As a writer of blurts, poetry, whatever (I tend to lean towards whatever, myself). Sometimes I wish to convey that there are multiple voices, or thoughts intertwined with spoken phrases. To differentiate between those voices, I commonly use italics or parenthesis within the text. I could see using align left and align right to do the same thing, specifically I wanted to convey two distinct voices, or place two distinct presences within the words. In fact, I think I will take that as a challenge to do so sometime.

I have seen centered text used to create shapes. There is a phrase for that concept but it escapes me and I don’t care enough to google it. Once again, if you are being spare with your words, you might want to use such a device to reinforce a meaning or a metric.

It comes down to Poetry is what it is. Rybka was always so angry when the formatting didn’t allow him to present his words in the shape he desired. He felt it lost meaning. If a writer thinks formatting offers value then they should pursue it. I think Chipbutty’s example shows where it can add value and add meaning.

 

[Palba_Noruda]

I don't have a strong preference for any word processing tools... They're all just typing to me. I happen to use Word a lot because of the integration to other MSOffice programs. I like being able to import and export data freely between Access, Excel, Publisher, PowerPoint and Word. It's taken a year of intensive practice to be able to integrate everything to the degree that I really can count myself a professional.

There are free online tutorials for pretty much every software version you have so, even though some programs have gone the way of dinosaurs or freeware, you can learn them all well enough to be effective.

Oh yeah, I def still use word, especially at work and for times when I need to send a word file over email, which is quite often. I certainly don't like it. I have the opportunity to work with graphic artists who manipulate texts that we work with in InDesign or Quark... Those programs are generally much nicer for publishing, but not nearly as prevalent as Word. Eh... If can be interesting to work the limitations of the hardware and software etc.

Ever since I lost that one document, I have done very little writing that is stored strictly on my computer. I do a lot of writing in a notebook, and I put some stuff out here in my sketchbook thread that i might have otherwise just stored on my computer. To tell the truth, I don't even like the idea of storing things on my computer... it seems so much more alive to put it out here. I don't mind having writing with pen on ink that will never see the light of day... Who knows why those kind of arbitrary little preferences develop...

 

[EroticOrogeny]

I forgot about FrameMaker. I used to use that, and even talked my boss into buying a license for me to use at home. It does a much better job than Word for properly placing figures in your text. I haven't use it for quite some time but I did install it on my then new (now almost 2 years old) computer so I could access files I have saved on a external drive I can plug in when I need it.
I try to keep copies of what I want on multiple disks so I can recover them if necessary. And some are on networked drives at work, which are regularly backed up.

 

[ishtat]

One of my lesser talents is that I can write backwards quite well with my non- dominant hand. I once did a short piece for a class I was taking in this mode . Neither class nor teacher was overly impressed, but I was slightly pleased that 3 people out of 17 claimed they didn't even notice.

Just wondered how many other carefully constructed shapes go unnoticed?

 

[Angeline]

One of my lesser talents is that I can write backwards quite well with my non- dominant hand. I once did a short piece for a class I was taking in this mode . Neither class nor teacher was overly impressed, but I was slightly pleased that 3 people out of 17 claimed they didn't even notice.

Just wondered how many other carefully constructed shapes go unnoticed?

That's quite interesting. Do you mind my asking which hand? I'm left-handed naturally as are a number of people on my father's side of the family. His mother was forced in school to write with her right hand (because that was public education in America at the turn of the twentieth century). She had awful unreadable writing with her right hand, but could print beautifully with her left. She had developed that printing on her own.

You should be transcribing Hebrew, man!

 

[Tzara]

That's quite interesting. Do you mind my asking which hand? I'm left-handed naturally as are a number of people on my father's side of the family. His mother was forced in school to write with her right hand (because that was public education in America at the turn of the twentieth century). She had awful unreadable writing with her right hand, but could print beautifully with her left. She had developed that printing on her own.

You should be transcribing Hebrew, man!

This got me thinking about writing a poem titled Write to Left, but I decided that I have inflicted enough bad poetry on the forum for the moment.

Plus I couldn't come up with a first line (though "Languages don't have a direction" would be killer, I think, if I could come up with anything as follow-on, which I can't).

Anyway, I did find this article at W3C, which I thought was really interesting.

You may, of course, not.

 

[EroticOrogeny]

This got me thinking about writing a poem titled Write to Left, but I decided that I have inflicted enough bad poetry on the forum for the moment.

Plus I couldn't come up with a first line (though "Languages don't have a direction" would be killer, I think, if I could come up with anything as follow-on, which I can't).

Anyway, I did find this article at W3C, which I thought was really interesting.

You may, of course, not.

I found it interesting. I wasn't aware that Arabic is like Hebrew in that regard.
I know we use Arabic numerals - when written in Arabic text is the most significant digit on the left or right?

Has anyone seen poetry published in Arabic or Hebrew (or another RTL language). Is it right justified, rather than left?

 

[butters]

Tzara, you're either nuts, paranoid, or fishing for compliments.

no need to go fishing, your writing is one of the reasons i enjoy this forum as much as i do. don't get too stingy with it, mk?

 

[Palba_Noruda]

Backwards starting at bottom

__________________.way either go ,people their
_____________of some surely like ,words
_________Their .direction a
__have don't Azeri The
_________.irezA eht ron
____________,t'ndid icniV aD
_______________.ti htiw ygnits oot teg t'noD
_________________.noitcerid a evah t'nod segaugnaL

 

[UnderYourSpell]

I can type nearly as fast one handed (my right) as I can with two although I'm not nearly as fast or as accurate as when I did it for a living. Aren't you supposed to be able to read gobbledegook as long as the first and last letters are in the right place as in .....

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Olny 55% of plepoe can.

 

[ishtat]

That's quite interesting. Do you mind my asking which hand? I'm left-handed naturally as are a number of people on my father's side of the family. His mother was forced in school to write with her right hand (because that was public education in America at the turn of the twentieth century). She had awful unreadable writing with her right hand, but could print beautifully with her left. She had developed that printing on her own.

You should be transcribing Hebrew, man!

I too am left handed as was my father and all my children. My father was given two strokes of the cane on his left hand for his first month at school aged six,( 1940"s) until my grandmother found out... she was a woman of ferocious temper, as the school mistress discovered!

Oddly enough he taught himself to write with his right hand as a teenager following a severe injury to his left arm.

Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo were both left handed - unfortunately the comparasion ends there.

 

[EroticOrogeny]

I can type nearly as fast one handed (my right) as I can with two although I'm not nearly as fast or as accurate as when I did it for a living. Aren't you supposed to be able to read gobbledegook as long as the first and last letters are in the right place as in .....

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Olny 55% of plepoe can.

That does seem to be true, as evidenced by your example - had no trouble reading it. I hadn't thought of first and last letters as being a key to decoding it.
Compiler doesn't see it that way when I type 'retrun' in place of 'return'. I think a lot of my traspositions have to do with switching hands while typing - either staying with one hand too long (as with 'retrun' above) or alternating when I shouldn't.

I was a terrible typist earlier on - having to do a lot of corrections. I've gotten better with lots of use of computer keyboard. And monitor - typing on a hardcopy device such as a teletype can be frustrating when you make a typo. Can be really hard to read what's really there. Sometimes have to refresh with control-R to read it.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

I too am left handed as was my father and all my children. My father was given two strokes of the cane on his left hand for his first month at school aged six,( 1940"s) until my grandmother found out... she was a woman of ferocious temper, as the school mistress discovered!

Oddly enough he taught himself to write with his right hand as a teenager following a severe injury to his left arm.

Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo were both left handed - unfortunately the comparasion ends there.

Another one who is cack handed