Week 6 Reading Response – Chloe Madigan

In this week’s readings the impact that the physical presentation of a text can have on its readers’/viewers’ interpretation stood out to me both in Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas and Solmaz Sharif’s LOOK. As Wren noted, the engagement of more senses than “just that of mental sight” is something I don’t often take into consideration when reading poetry; however, in these writings the influence of visual perception felt prominent. In considering this, I was reminded of numerous psychological studies that demonstrate the powerful emotional responses that can occur in relation to the orientation, color, sizing, and font selection of text, with results such as red text leading to a stronger negativity bias and connected cursive lettering often conveying unity or collectivism. In applying this to Layli Long Soldier’s work, I was interested by the construction of Three in He Sápa, the empty void constructed within the boundaries of her text led me to perceive a mixture of feelings: a sense of entrapment in viewing the connected, 4-sided walls of words as well as a sense of loneliness in being forced to view the blank center, making the core of the piece emptiness rather than a contextual moment in the writing. In considering Sharif’s work, I felt as though the particularly straight, angular, and uppercase font that he utilized when stating words related to warfare such as torture, thermal shadow, look, pinpoint target, etc. impacted my perception of those words as seemingly connected in a shared place of formality, durability, and power.

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