Nature Through Emojis and Concrete Poetry

Johnny Quinn
2 min readFeb 5, 2021

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Emojis themselves are poetry in a way. They express emotions through little individual images. So writing a poem with only emojis seems to make sense. Having been tasked to write a poem about nature through mainly emojis, our group came up with up with the theme of good weather/bad weather. We looked through the list of iOS emojis and we chose emojis that we thought represented good weather and those that represented bad weather. At first, we chose emojis that were rather obvious, such as the sun representing good weather and the rain representing the bad weather. But we then became conflicted with this idea as we all didn’t necessarily dislike rain, so we then transformed our theme into the separation of nice weather and extreme weather. Our finalized poem is below:

🏞☀️🌤🌞🌕🌧🌨❄️🌸🌺🌿🌴🌳🌈👕🩳😊

🌬💨🌩⛈🌊💦☔️🌫🌪🥀🏜🌋☄️🔥🌑😞

Concrete poetry

Poetry itself can be either somewhat obvious or a complete mystery. So concrete poetry forming the words into an image adds a whole other dimension to the poem which can be more or less mysterious. Having never written a concrete poem before, I found some challenges when creating my first one. Trying to write the words in such a way so they come together as an image is certainly difficult. On the other hand, I found just how expressive concrete poetry can be. One can put a lot of hidden meaning into a concrete poem. What I came up with for a concrete poem is below

When This Is All Over

Concrete Poetry and Coding

In coding, similar to poetry, a piece of code can either be somewhat obvious or a complete mystery. 99% of the time, the way the code looks is completely irrelevant but there is still a way to interpret code based on how it looks. In coding, code can be nested meaning that a piece of code is ‘under’ or maybe even ‘reliant’ on another piece of code. So perhaps one could see how much code is nested and see that as a gauge as to how much of the code overall is potentially dependent on other pieces of code.

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