How can poetry touch the heart (of the matter)?

For the project “The Heart of the Matter” I chose to focus on poetry’s ability to explore the human experience in a profound and emotional way. I aimed to create something that highlights poetic texts, calling for active engagement with the project. After selecting over a hundred poems, I narrowed them down to 74, chosen for brevity and universality, providing a visual expression of various themes and experiences from authors of different nationalities and epochs. Collaborating with ChatGPT 3.5, I inserted the text of the poems and asked to integrate them into a larger narrative without losing their meaning. The book exhibits a stark contrast between the redundancy of artificial texts and the simplicity of the underlying poems. The pages, arranged according to themes, follow the course of the day from the morning’s azure to the dark blue of the night. The words ultimately transform into a starry sky, while the artificial text loses visibility and importance. The complexity of my project aims to show contrast between excess and simplicity, encouraging the reading of what truly matters.