WingDings: An Exercise in Nonsense

I Don't Really Care How You Send It, Just Send Me A Letter
by Audrey Guire


We briefly joked in class about WingDing poetry when we were talking about postcard poems. I scribbled a frantic note to myself to try it sometime. I thought that today would be a good day to see what happened. WingDings were rather familiar to me because of how much I played with them when I was in first grade, right after my family got our first computer.

When I started, I had to decide what I was going for. Was I going to write a poem in "normal" English and then just change the font? Or was I going to assemble a poem using the WingDing images to compose the poem itself?

I tried both. The top image is WingDings poetry using the font to convey a meaning, rather than mask it. The following is a poem I wrote in a normal font and then switched to WingDings. I made it short, for the purpose of space. Also, to make comparison more effective, I wrote the poem on the same theme as the WingDing poem above: communication. (I've also provided the translation, since image-posting was the only way to get WingDings on blogger, rendering copy/paste useless.)

I Pray For The Phone to Ring
by Audrey Guire


It just looks like a mess. In English, this poem reads:

Silence scares me.
Just let me know you’re alive
And that we’re okay.
But I know it’s my fault
I hear anger in quiet and
Your words sound like love.

It's not the best poem, but it was enough to see that assembling poems in WingDings is probably better for artistic value than just cryptically translating them. It sort of makes me want to keep trying, to see what other meanings I can pull out of well assembled strings of WingDings. I might have to try mixing it with English next.

Anyway. I think it's pretty cool, but any thoughts? Is this really poetry, or is it just modern art? Is it even that?

-Audrey Guire