[-empyre-] (forwarded from Jorge Luiz Antonio) Tribute to Ana Maria Uribe

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

Dear members of Empyre

    I would like to thank everybody during my participation in Empyre.
    Very sad with Ana Maria Uribe's passing, I would like to join everybody
in a kind of tribute to her as a good person and as a good poet.
    On February I decided to write a review on her books, CD-ROMs and sites,
and it was published in Portuguese in the printed monthly Jornal do MARGS
(Journal of Museum of Art from Rio Grande do Sul), where I have the column
"Sites". The brief review was published in March and is available in:
www.margs.org.br. Below there is an English version of the text. I didn't
know it would become a tribute to her.

    Best regards from Brazil


Jorge Luiz Antonio
Brazilian Digital Art and Poetry on the Web
http://www.vispo.com/misc/BrazilianDigitalPoetry.htm


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Ana Maria Uribe and the dance of letters



The poetry of Ana Maria is so sprightly that it comes out of the printed
pages, for it has the versatility of being suited to the printed and
electronic media and explores each one in a creative and attractive way.
Reading her printed book offers us the spatialized words which evokes
sounds, movements and images. The CD-ROM or the site brings us too enchanted
sounds and movements: they are letters and colors that dance, dialogue,
enchant, make us laugh and think. In the homepage, the sound made by a
ticking clock marks a kind of time of reading: a strong and repeated sound
which invites the navigator to go on on his/her way, to not to stop, and
read more: http://amuribe.tripod.com .

The Argentinean Ana Maria Uribe, from Buenos Aires, is author of: Tipoemas
(Typoems)(1968), typographic poems created by using the typewriter Lettera;
Anipoemas (Anipoems) (1997), animated poems recreated for the web; Escaleras
y Otros Anipoemas (Ladders and Others Poems), a selection of her poems in
CD-ROM; Tipoemas y Anipoemas (Typoems and Anipoems) (hand-made book) and El
Circo: El gran desfile (The Circus: The Grand Parade) (Russian edition by
Eter Panji of World Visual Poetry collection).

The site was built with the same concision of her poems: the routes are
clear, easy and agreeable, without heavy images that take long to download.
Sounds, noises and voices follow all the words in space which move. The
behaviour of the dancing letters indicates daily, trivial, automated and
constant activities, but the way this situations appears, it makes us laugh
or think.  It is what we can notice in some words and titles as: Burbujas
(Bubbles), Panorama desde un tren (A view from a train), Gimnasia (Gym), Se
largó (It's raining), Tren en marcha (A train in motion), Otoño (Autumn), De
Parménides a J. P. Sartre (From Parmenides to J.-P. Sartre), Bowling,
Guggenheim Museum, Hojas Rojas Secas (Dry Red Leaves), among others.

"Poema Cortante" (Cutting Poem) is, for me, the limit of the media and the
fusion of verbal, visual and animation languages, one of the most important
aspect which characterizes this poet's work: a group of letters "o" draw the
handle of lamina (knife? dagger? sword? which is formed by a  prolonged
trace. The poem format seems to suggest an "o" of admiration for the
discovery of the fusion of languages.



         The interviews given by Uribe -
www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/uribe/uribe.html and
www.officinadopensamento.com.br/officina/entre-vistas/entre-vistas_ana_maria
_uribe.htm - are very interesting and helps us to know the person who made
this so happy, playing and reflexive poetry.



Jorge Luiz Antonio