"Zen Advertising Co." by Bruce McRae

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

The Poet:
Pushcart-nominee Bruce McRae is a Canadian musician with over 800 publications, including Poetry.com and The North American Review. His first book, The So-Called Sonnets is available from the Silenced Press website or via Amazon books. To hear his music and view more poems visit his website: www.bpmcrae.com, or ‘TheBruceMcRaeChannel’ on YouTube.

The Poem:
As consumers we know we’re being sold an “illusion of happiness” along with our paper tissues and radial tires, but we know it through image and the quality of the voice “disclaiming… side effects.” The connection between our purchases and our self-image is unstated so it can remain unexamined. Bruce McRae will have none of that. He loads his poem with Zen-like language to give the lie to the implicit claims of advertising in general and his own poem in particular. “There is no product” is a half-truth – the product is the customer, a Zen koan every advertiser has mastered.

The Design:
Title & Name: 24pt & 20pt Century Gothic
Body: 12pt Gill Sans
Zen practice works against self-focus, so the typefaces for this poem needed something neutral, something that almost disappears behind the text. Gill Sans has a thin stroke that leaves a very light mark on the page, forming the text and then receding, without judgment, into the surrounding white space. Century Gothic offers just enough additional weight to pin the poem down, suggest the column of other classified ads from which it’s been cut.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"The Builder" by Dolores Hayden

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The Poet:
Dolores Hayden’s poetry collections are American Yard (2004) and Nymph, Dun, and Spinner (2010). Recent work appears in Poetry, Raritan, The Yale Review, Shenandoah, Best American Poetry, andAmerican Scientist. She’s won awards from the Poetry Society of America and the New England Poetry Club and been a poetry fellow at Djerassi and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is also the author of several non-fiction books on American urban landscapes including The Power of Place and A Field Guide to Sprawl. At Yale University, she teaches a class called “Poets’ Landscapes.” Her web site iswww.DoloresHayden.com.

The Poem:
It’s hard not to ache for the house as it’s being demolished. The poet takes pains to personalize it (“clapboard skin,” a chestnut skeleton), which makes the speaker sound callous, shortsighted. But Hayden leaves out what’s to become of the cleared property and in so doing, doesn’t seal the builder’s indictment. Instead she gives us that amazing line from Frost. Flowers are most beautiful during their bloom, but that time “after the petals go” is part of their life cycle, too. If the speaker is wrong about anything, it’s that “masonry is nothing like a flower.” Even without being pulled down by the builder, the house would eventually have succumbed on its own, just like Old man Smithson. So the poem becomes a Rorschach test for the reader: is the builder blindly violent, or will the “possibility” he measures rise like “tulips…/ through rubble”?

The Design:
Title & Name: 100pt & 24pt Garamond
Body: 14pt Garamond italic and roman
The poem isn’t just another demolition story for this builder, it’s part manifesto, part apologia. It’s personal, so the body of the text needed a similar intimacy, an italic lean forward as if the letters were as eager to tell this tale as the builder himself. Garamond offers an easily legible italic that mixes well with its own roman, allowing the quote from Frost to feel solid amid the story of the tumbling house and letters of the title. All these elements together vibrate on the page, a visual irony to go with the poem’s verbal one.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Poem on the Fridge" by Paul Hostovsky

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The Poet:
Paul Hostovsky is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Naming Names (2013, Main Street Rag). His poems have won a Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net awards. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and was a Featured Poet on the Georgia Poetry Circuit 2013. To read more of his work, visit him at www.paulhostovsky.com.

The Poem:
Certainly the fridge door is a place of honor, but the “highest honor/ a poem can aspire to”? At first this reads like sarcasm. And the poem seems to take itself so seriously, giving a triumphant speech about its own achievement. It smacks of the self-important posture often assumed by art considered “high,” which is why we chuckle – the fridge is decidedly hodgepodge and common. But then the poem changes focus, “the song in its head” changing from the physical words “lined up here” to what they signify: “a dispensary of indispensable details” observed from surrounding life. Happily there is lots of food and a little medicine. Essential stuff is “seeping through this white door” as well as the white page that holds the words to the poem, alive and infectious.

The Design:
Title: 50pt Gabriola
Name: 36pt Gabriola
Body: 14pt Franchise by Weathersbee Type
This refrigerator poem is so proud, so honored to have that magnet “like a medal/ pinned to its lapel.” It stands very straight against the fridge’s fuselage, at attention like a general who has just been awarded his fourth star. The typeface for the body therefore needed a straight spine and squared shoulders; Franchise delivers, adding its distinctly medal-like colons for good measure. The title needed a bit more curve, something worthy of a personal invitation to “Stop here a moment/ and listen to the poem… It’s having a party.” The kind of script that might issue from the hand of a very upright, formal being trying to let down their hair a little: Gabriola.

online ISSN: 2651-3801