Jaclyn Saik-Project 12-Proposal

I am planning to work with my classmate Alice Fang to create an interactive poem. We plan to use one of our favorite poems, “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou, not only because it’s an excellent piece of writing but also because her message feels especially pertinent in today’s political and social climate. The poem is 43 lines and 9 stanzas long, and we plan to figure out a way to break it up and display it on separate slides, which the user can move through as they continue to read and interact. We want to create interactions specific the different lines (or couplets, or stanzas). For example, the line “I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,/Welling and swelling I bear in the tide”, we plan to animate the text based on the mouse position to imitate waves.

We were inspired by the work of programmer and poet Allison Parish, who creates a lot of work involving interactive text and generative poetry.