dsh

The John Rylands Library holds an important example by a British pioneer of Concrete poetry: the poem ‘Frog, Pond, Plop’ by Dom Sylvester Houedard.

Dom Sylvester Houedard (1924-1992), who often went simply by dsh (all lower case), was a Benedictine monk whose archive came to the John Rylands in the early 1990s. 

He was a theologian and an avant-garde poet and artist. Described as a pivotal figure in British counterculture and the creator of the typestract, a form of poetry and artwork created by manipulation of his typewriter. This fits within a category known as Concrete Poetry.

Concrete Poetry

Concrete poetry, where the spatial arrangement of words and letters is as important in conveying meaning as the words themselves, is a modern term for an ancient practice. As far back as 300 BC, Simmias of Rhodes was writing poems to fit the shape of the subject. One of the most recognizable contemporary examples is ‘The Mouse’s Tale’ from Alice in Wonderland.

Frog, Pond, Plop

The typestract “Frog, Pond, Plop” is a re-working of a haiku by 17^th century Japanese poet Bashō.

Haiku’s are 17 syllables, split over three lines in a five-seven-five configuration. They are typically non-rhyming, usually about the natural world, describing fleeting moments in nature. Again, the form of the poem is as important as its content.

Basho’s 17^th century Japanese original has been translated multiple times. Here’s one version, translated by Tim Chilcott, taken from an article written by Chris McCabe (former National Poetry Librarian) in Cent Magazine:

ancient is the pond —
suddenly a frog leaps — now!
the water echoes

McCabe’s description of dsh’s reworking of this poem is as follows:

“What seems at once little more than a joke might actually be the ultimate haiku… In dsh’s poem, the vision of the frog is no longer something that happened to a poet; the onus is instead placed on the reader to imagine the scene, making it happen in their mind, for the first time… Perhaps the flaw with traditional haikus is that they’re too long. Why take seventeen syllables when you can use just three?” (McCabe, C. 2025. Frog – Pond – Plop, accessed 05/08/2025)

“Frog, Pond, Plop” is also a 3D poem.

When the page is flat it is a collection of jumbled letters.

The poem is revealed when the paper is folded into a paper fortune teller.

The word ‘Frog’ is constant, but ‘pond’ and ‘plop’ are revealed and disappear in order, adding to the sense of transience, that this is a brief moment.

This cannot be experienced from flat images. Constant folding and handling of the item would cause wear, and the item would not last.

Heritage 3D Modelling

3D modelling allows us to put 3D images of items online. We can show better representations of objects moving in space, and objects that are too fragile to display.

My attempts to model “Frog, Pond, Plop” began with photographing the item flat, before attempting to digitally ‘fold’ it into the correct shape using 3D modelling software Blender.

Digital Origami

However, as Blender is not standard software for our team and I have been teaching myself how to use it, I ran into several problems.

Online searches indicated that the solution to the object clipping through itself was to make smaller, inner folds and add joints between them to keep surfaces from touching.

This did not solve the problem.

More searches suggested using Blender’s physics simulations to treat this as a solid object that should not pass through itself.

This sort of solved the problem, but also created new and different problems.

An alternative suggestion was using cloth physics to simulate paper…

Unfortunately, when using some of Blenders physics settings, gravity becomes a factor and you have to create a ‘floor’ on which the object can sit.

Forget Digital Origami

While I am sure Blender has the capacity to fold this item in this way I have not yet learned how, so instead I constructed the shape in it’s final folded position from several flat plane meshes, joined together.

This allowed me to create the desired shape with less armature so it could be more easily animated.

Once the badly painted lettering had been replaced with the correct image texture, the model was complete.

This model is not structured like the real object, and everything is fake except for the images superimposed on the model. It gives a sense of the object but it is not good enough for remote researchers to inspect the materiality of the item.

Currently, this representation shows the poem as it’s meant to be seen, and it allows us to show it to a wider audience. However, we should be completely transparent about the fact that these models are merely representations, as well as about what we did to achieve those representations.

Frog, Pond, Plop by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library on Sketchfab

I think this issue will be increasingly relevant as we do more of this kind of work.

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