My mother is teaching chemistry in an elementary school. Once she came to the idea that they should play Scrabble with the children in the class by using the chemical signs of the elements. On the night before the class we tried to make some examples, and there were hilarious findings. So I kept playing until the periodic table became poems. The words of the poems are still made from the chemical signs of the elements, but I use accented letters and articles to get a wider pool of words. I created compositions from these poems, in which in addition to the visual appearance of the periodic table, I also wanted to represent the chemical symbols in the body of the text. So the words are divided by capital letters to chemical signs. Although the poems exist in this form only in Hungarian, I wanted to prepare an approximate English translation, for which Norbert Csizi provided assistance.
The project is a part of the subthemes Re-imagining identity through poetry, and Poetry and the Digital Commons - New platforms, new audiences.
Author
Eszter Szegedi
Eszter Szegedi born in 1999 in Debrecen and currently lives there. She is a radiologic technologist and a poet. Her poems are published in several Hungarian literature journals. Due to her studies and job, she is interested in the representation of the human body and diseases in her artworks. In 2016 she started to create words and poems from the chemical signs of the periodic table and she wants to extend this project to a book form. From 2024 she is the editor of the lira section of the online literature magazin, Entropláza.
