Ana Maria Uribe
Ana Maria's original site: Ana Maria at the Iowa Review: Ana Maria at BeeHive (USA) An interview of Ana Maria by Jorge Luiz Antonio
A tribute to her work published on the -empyre-
list (republished on rhizome.org). Browse the month of March 2004 in the
-empyre- archives for other posts concerning
Ana Maria. Ana Maria did all the translations Leonardo Flores's reviews of some of Ana Maria's work: Leonardo Flores's article about her work: Jorge Luis Antonio's review of her work: David Daniels has done a visual |
Ana Maria Uribe was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1944. She was a visual poet from the late sixties until her death on March 5, 2004. In addition to her Web site, she is the author of a single Spanish-English book which is home-printed, hand-sewn and hand-bound called Tipoems and Anipoems, 1968-2001. She also published a CD of her work (done with Macromedia Director) titled Escaleras y otros Anipoemas, 2001. Her site is in both her native Spanish and English. Some of her work has also been translated into Finnish by Marko Niemi and Romanian by Constantin Marcusan. Much of her work is intensely lettristic/concrete and, though very much of typographic language, communicates across borders, across languages, with little translation required. She was very much an internationalist poet of the world, which she travelled extensively. Below is an email Ana Maria sent Kevin Hehir of Canada in response to Kevin's request to show Ana Maria's work to his students on World Poetry Day in 2003. Ana Maria's email is a good introduction to her work. For inquiries about her work, please contact Jim Andrews. She is missed by her family, friends and fans around the world. Her poetry is an inspiration to those who wish to speak simply but with their full humanity across the borders that need not divide us. ja --------------------------------------------- My greetings to St. John's, Newfoundland, from Buenos Aires, Argentina, on World Poetry Day. The fact that in these troubled times people from all over the world are communicating to honor poetry may give us some hope for the future. My website is called "Tipoemas y Anipoemas" (Typoems and Anipoems), and it contains my visual poetry works. I will explain this name. Many years ago I wrote "Typoems", a series of visual or typographic poems which I typed with an old machine called Lettera 22. Typoems were limited by one fixed font, the size and position of the page on the typewriter, and the black ink ribbon. In 1997, I bought my first computer and started "Anipoems" or animated visual poems for the Internet. These at first maintained most of the restrictions of the earlier Typoems: they never exceeded the size of the screen, so you did not have to scroll up and down, they were in one font only, and until 2000, they were all in black and white. And sound? Sound did not really matter in these early Anipoems. Most of them could be understood without it. Sound became important in mid 2001, in pieces such as "The Circus", "A Busy Day", "Discipline" and "Deseo - Desejo - Desire". These more recent works also begin to have a plot, however simple it may be. There is a timeline with a starting point, a climax and a denouement. "A Busy Day" depicts one day in the life of Mr. @. In "Discipline" the "h"'s (a letter which in Spanish is always mute) are tyrannized by a dictator. In " Deseo - Desejo - Desire" - a trilingual "erotic" Anipoem - the letters "s" and "i" in "desire" join in a tango dance, forming the Spanish word "si" (=yes), in apparent acceptance. However, on a second reading, "si" in Spanish also means "if", so success should not be taken for granted after all. In Anipoems, the main components are typography and motion, in that order. And once motion is added, rhythm becomes all important, since I work with repetition and short sequences of elements. Typography and words - as in the old Typoems - are still the main elements, since the letters themselves are my source of inspiration. They project themselves into the world around me and they act upon it, and not, as much, the other way around, as one might be led to believe. Typoems and Anipoems by
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