"At the Native American Film Festival" by Jenny Cropp

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

The Poet: 
Jenny Yang Cropp is the author of one chapbook,Hanging the Moon (RockSaw Press). Her poems have appeared in Boxcar Poetry Review, Ecotone, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other journals. She grew up mainly in Oklahoma, received her M.F.A in creative writing from Minnesota State University-Mankato, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of South Dakota.

The Poem: 
This poem is divided in two, like its speaker. First there are the things that don’t fit, her peculiar marks of otherness. What follows, though, isn’t a simple discovery of belonging – it’s the illusion of belonging in which the speaker eagerly participates. The ache of it is palpable in the abrupt change in tone; matter-of-fact acceptance is quickly replaced by the wishful idea of being “her daughter.” In fact, the idea of being the Comanche woman’s child overtakes the speaker so fully that she says, “I think of the blue/ born on her daughter’s back” instead of “on [my] back.” It makes the last line – “I am part of something whole” – ring a little hollow, revealing the longing that coexists with acceptance.

The Design: 
Title & Name: 27pt & 24pt Engravers Gothic small capitals 
Body: 14pt American Typewriter 
American Typewriter is uniformly heavy with lots of squiggle in its lowercase g, curvy lower f, t, a… like a “mass of dark veins… bruise-like” on the page. Engravers Gothic provides the title with a marquee quality, announcing what’s playing at the film fest. Together with the poet’s name it forms three sides of a box, tilted, since the speaker is between worlds and not likely to fit into any single place.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

Two Haiku by Ben Moeller-Gaa

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The Poet:
Ben Moeller-Gaa is the author of two haiku chapbooks, Wasp Shadows (Folded Word Press 2014) and Blowing on a Hot Soup Spoon (poor metaphor 2014). His haiku, essays and book reviews have appeared in over 25 journals worldwide including Acorn, Modern Haiku, A Hundred Gourds, Frogpond, Shamrock and World Haiku Review as well as in several anthologies such as Haiku 21, the Red Moon Press's yearly "Best of English Language Haiku" anthologies (2011, 2012, 2013) and The Haiku Foundation's Mobile Haiku App.

The Poem:
When Matsuo Basho wrote, “Even in Kyoto/ hearing the cuckoo’s cry/ I long for Kyoto” (tr. Robert Haas) he was both celebrating his present moment and mourning it as it passed. Ben Moeller-Gaa celebrates two such moments: the moon’s reflection on the water is the essence of a calm summer’s evening; the flight of the goldfinch is the energy of spring. Like the cuckoos that sing in Kyoto every year, the koi and the goldfinch have a fleeting beauty all their own. They can be revisited, but each new encounter will differ from our memory – what has become an idea about summer evenings or spring – and remind us that nothing stays the same.

The Design:
Title & Name: 30pt & 22pt Engravers Gothic
Body: 20pt Chalkduster
These two haiku are at once the same and opposite. Rather than reflect their differences with separate typefaces, Chalkduster, with its airy, brush like strokes, represents their common feature: impermanence. All moments pass; all chalkboards and sidewalks get washed clean. The mirror arrangement requires the reader to choose a dominant point of view even as the other remains in sight. Setting the title and poet’s name on a circle make this a coin to be tossed.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Variation, Without Chickens" by Devon Miller-Duggan

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The Poet:
Devon Miller-Duggan's first collection, Pinning the Bird to the Wall, was published in 2008 by Tres Chicas Books. A chapbook of off-kilter poems about angels was just published in September by Finishing Line Press. She teaches Creative Writing at The University of Delaware.

The Poem:
It’s a tricky thing, writing homage. Stray too close to the original and you’re ripping off your hero. Venture too far afield and your readers won’t make the connection. With this poem Miller-Duggan pulls it off because she riffs on sound where William Carlos Williams riffed on image. Each stanza swells to a crescendo by varying the combinations of r, w, d and s sounds; each stanza break lets the sound “glaze” “the spaces… in between.” The overall effect is a series of quick summer storms that swirl around the “red wheel/ barrow” of the source material. Indeed, “something must fall away – feathers, the sky,/ Much that flowers” for Williams’ poem to be born. The poet has imagined those lost details and made them her own.

The Design:
Title & Name: 24pt & 18pt Bodoni reverse italic
Body: 14pt Bodoni roman, italic & small capitals
So much of literature depends on what went before it; even when we’re not building on the past we’re breaking from it. A classic book typeface like Bodoni offers a long history but it also looks good doing things it’s designer never intended, like small capitals and reversed italic. The various styles are deployed to underscore the poem’s nods to WCW’s famous piece while maintaining a harmonious, modern integrity.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"My Oldest Memory" by Luke Daly

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The Poet:
Luke Daly lives on the west side of Buffalo, NY with his artist wife and two daughters, and he teaches writing and literature at Villa Maria College of Buffalo. His poetry and criticism appear in Basalt, the Blue Earth Review, Comstock Review, The Corresponder(Mankato, MN), and the Cream City Review. If you’d like to view more of his work, visit:http://www.creamcityreview.org/category/poetry/.

The Poem:
This poem is haunted. Sure, the title calls it a memory but the line between the living and the dead has blurred to a fog of pipe smoke. Curious how the room is filled with “ancestors” instead of family, how their “flotilla” rows “to a dim house in a new country” as if crossing the River Lethe. All of this before the speaker calls himself a specter, “paralyzed” in a doorway. Maybe the line between death and life isn’t the pipe smoke. Maybe the line is that doorway and he is visible to the “one/ who can’t see past her knuckles” because neither are alive. Maybe this is the speaker’s day of birth. Maybe it’s just an odd memory dominated by a bright carpet and elderly relatives. Happily it’s a poem, so it can be both.

The Design:
Title & Name: 24pt Filament by Gaelleing
Body: 14pt Skinny Chick by Blue Sky
Skinny Chick and Filament are each spectral in their own way, legibly ghostlike, caught “between kitchen and pallor.” For Skinny Chick it’s those extra long descenders and ascenders plus the slightly uneven baseline that give it the anxious feel of a child’s handwriting. Filament is that same child grown up, blocking capitals with several parallel strokes, trying to etch something tenuous into a more solid state. Together they look ad hoc, slight, ephemeral.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Lilith" by Janet McCann

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The Poet:
Journals publishing Janet McCann’s poems includeKansas Quarterly, Parnassus, Nimrod, Sou’wester, New York Quarterly, Tendril, Poetry Australia, etc.. She has won five chapbook contests, sponsored by Pudding Publications, Chimera Connections, Franciscan University Press, Plan B Press, and Sacramento Poetry Center. A 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship winner, she has taught at Texas A & M University since 1969. Her most recent poetry collection: The Crone at the Cathedral (Lamar University Press, 2013).

The Poem:
So often Lilith is depicted as mad in one sense or another, so much so that the first line of this poem feels like a feint. Could she really be at peace with her life? Won’t the rest of the poem give the lie to her claim? How refreshing, then, to find this Lilith does actually “rest there” (from the quotation from Isaiah) in her self-proclaimed “No Man’s Land.” Even as she addresses Eve, the woman who replaced her in Adam’s life, she makes no threats, insists only on being heard. She knows she is frightening, too, but doesn’t seek to inspire terror, only her own “image in the brackish pond.” The poem then, gives the lie to the idea that a woman who desires solitude must be mad.

The Design:
Title & Name: 36pt & 24pt Roman Antique by Dieter Steffmann
Epigraph: 10pt Century Schoolbook
Body: 12pt Aji Hand by Ajith R
There are two stories here: the official, codified one from the Bible and Lilith’s own, personal statement in response. The two typefaces had to reflect those different sources and yet complement each other visually. The passage from Isaiah is represented in Century Schoolbook, the most traditional of the three faces used. It’s regular italic echoes the motion of Aji Hand, which approximates a quick scrawl. Roman Antique’s straight lines and grainy edges lie somewhere between the two styles, uniting them further.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Retreat" by Susanna Lang

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The Poet:
Susanna Lang’s newest collection of poems, Tracing the Lines, was published in 2013 by the Brick Road Poetry Press. Her first collection, Even Now, was published in 2008 by The Backwaters Press, and a chapbook, Two by Two, was released in October 2011 from Finishing Line Press. She has published original poems, essays and translations from the French, in such journals as Little Star, New Letters, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Green Mountains Review, The Baltimore Review, Kalliope, Southern Poetry Review, World Literature Today, Chicago Review, New Directions, and Jubilat. Translations include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language, both by Yves Bonnefoy. She lives in Chicago, where she teaches in the Chicago Public Schools.

The Poem:
Retreat: a verb and a noun, an action as well as a place. This language play is essential in the compressed space of poetry and Lang constructs her poem around it. There is the journey to the beach house, then the beach house itself; the spiders’ scuttle and the crack in the plaster where they hole up to wait; the departure of day leading to darkness; the long conversation that arrives at comfortable silence. In fact, the poem itself is a daylong journey toward stillness. What’s to be found in the space after the poem stops talking? The poem poses a question without asking, provides no answer beyond a sense of peace.

The Design:
Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Optima
Body: 12pt Gill Sans Light
The environment of this poem is so quiet it seems to swallow any sound louder than the call of a loon. Such a poem needs a thin, light presence on the page, something to suggest the filament of a spider’s web. Gill Sans Light is both wispy and crisp, like the spiders’ handiwork. Optima is slightly heavier but equally crisp, a broom put to good use at the beginning and end of each visit. In the title, though, an extra, reversed t hints at the spiders’ retreat occasioned by the broom as well as their life in the house sans people.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Dementia" by Katie Phillips

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

The Poet:
Katie Phillips grew up in Maryland & Colorado and lived in Montana before moving to the Chicago suburbs, where she now enjoys walking her Alaskan Malamute to her job at a local non-profit organization. Katie’s chapbook "Driving Montana, Alone" was published in 2010 and the title poem was later read by Garrison Keillor on NPR's The Writers' Almanac.Since then, she has continued to write and travel around the country studying with various poets. She can be reached at DrivingMontanaAlone@gmail.comor through www.facebook.com/katie7phillips.

The Poem:
Phillips uses her couplets to create fragments; separate pockets of meaning and image that enhance the poem’s overall sense. Each addresses the title in some way, ranging from common ideas about dementia (“dis-remembering,/ details slipping”) to the idyllic (“away like a room/ full of light”) to the ominous (“were darkening./ Then she broke”) and finally desperate (“looking for/ a way out”). All of these exist simultaneously within “Dementia” the poem and the diagnosis, even as the poem’s sentences trace the overall progression of one woman’s disease.

The Design:
Title & Name: 60pt & 24pt Bodoni small capitals
Body: 14pt Averia by Dan Sayers
Bodoni’s thick upright strokes feel solid even as the title and poet’s name have been kerned open to make that hold on normalcy a little looser, a little more tenuous than normal. They are holding together, more or less like the speaker, who’s had a rough surprise on top of the difficult realities of losing a loved one to dementia. Averia’s letterforms have the rounded look of something more solid that has begun to dissolve. They feel right for scattered couplets, a poem barely holding its pieces together.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"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

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

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

Edition 6 Release Reading!

Friday April 11, 2014

Tavern of Fine Arts
313 Belt Ave, 63112

Reading 7pm sharp will be:

Ben Moeller-Gaa
Nicky Rainy
Catherine Rankovic

The Tavern has new art on the walls and a great menu, the inserts are printed on 'pink lemonade' paper this time, and Edition 6 = Three Years of Architrave! I hope you'll come help celebrate.