Kaavakartat

Kaavakartat is a term in literary technique describing a method that fuses cartography and poetic composition to generate spatially navigable narratives. In Kaavakartat, landscapes—real or fictional—are rendered not only as descriptive scenes but as coordinates and contours encoded within verse. Each segment of text may correspond to a location, landmark, or waypoint, and the sequence of verses can function like a walk through a map.

The word is a contemporary coinage drawing on kavya, a Sanskrit-rooted term for poetic form, and karta, a maker or creator. It has emerged in modern discussions of poetic spatiality and geopoetics as a way to discuss how poetry can encode space and movement.

Practically, Kaavakartat involves aligning poetic form with spatial cues: line breaks, meter, rhyme, or stanza breaks can mirror distances, directions, or topographic features. Readers are invited to reconstruct the implied map by following place names, relative directions, or geographic imagery embedded in the verse. The approach supports multimodal reading practices and can be adapted to standalone poetry, serialized narratives, or game design.

Applications include world-building for novels and immersive experiences, digital humanities projects that explore place through verse, and experimental poetry that treats a text as a legible atlas. Related concepts include poetic cartography, geopoetics, and map poetry.

Further reading on Kaavakartat remains limited to niche scholarly discussions and experimental anthologies.