"Where do you get your ideas?" by Michael Bazzett

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

the Poet: 

Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Oxford Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Poetry Northwest. He was the winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for his first full-length collection, You Must Remember This, (Milkweed Editions, 2014).

the Poem: 

The writing process can be mysterious—sometimes even to writers—so is it any surprise to find a tall tale filling in for a satisfying answer? It’s certainly more entertaining than the truth that lurks beneath the fanciful elements of this poem: creativity isn’t passive at all. There’s no muse to hand you something beautiful and fully realized. You’ve got to get out there, dodge the bad ideas and run the good ones down. And when you find them—the truly creative ideas—you won’t be sure what to make of them at first. Only then can you be still, or try to be still in the presence of something wild, something with the means to hurt you, something that will very likely mark you with its teeth.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 24pt Euphorigenic 

Body: 14pt Phosphorus Bromide

Without a satisfying explanation of their origins, ideas become fantastical creatures, surfacing from our subconscious like the Loch Ness Monster. The typeface for this poem had to capture that unbounded outlandishness while remaining legible through increasingly intense curvature. Phosphorus Bromide does just that, and Euphorigenic provides a complimentary whimsy. After all, the teeth aren’t real, but the idea of teeth.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Personal" by Michael Bazzett

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

the Poet: 
Michael Bazzett has new poems forthcoming inPloughshares, Redivider, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill, Literary Imagination and Prairie Schooner. He is the author of The Imaginary City, recently published in the OW! Arts Chapbook Series, and They: A Field Guide, forthcoming from Barge Press in early 2013. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.

the Poem: 
The Maori traditionally apply tattoos with chisels, a painful, elaborate, and scarring process marking those within the tribe as members of distinction and accomplishment. Though branded like one, the speaker is not Maori, and is instead a self-described “white guy” who still hasn’t found what he’s looking for. He’s pretty cheeky, too, what with that pun on “golden calf” and the crack about Nietzsche’s funeral. He even insists the commandments be a “mutual/ exchange.” His flippant tone, though, is a way to take a light hand with strong emotion. And therein lies the genius of this poem: its speaker wants to be both loved as an equal and surrender wholly that love. As an equal, he’ll maintain a “resonant silence” even as he seeks to lose himself within it.

The Design: 
Title: 52pt Neudorgger Scribble, designed by Manfred Klein 
Name: 28pt bold capitals & 18pt lower case Goudy Old Style 
Body: 14pt Goudy Old Style 
This poem’s design needed to reflect all its references, and what better way to do that than to make another? Maori tattoos, philosophers, old testament images turned on their heads and re-presented in a contemporary form not usually associated with poetry… this speaker wouldn’t be content with a personal ad that blended into a solid column of type. It needed to be illuminated. After all, that’s what we seek when we venture into scripture, philosophy or love.

Editorial & Design by Architrave Press, St. Louis 
Letterpress printed by Paper Boat Studios, St. Louis

The Old Now by Michael Bazzett

Read the full text of the poem by clicking on the image, or purchase it here.

The Poet:
Michael Bazzett's poems have appeared in West Branch, Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Green Mountains Review, DIAGRAM, and Guernica, among others, and his work was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He was the winner of the 2008 Bechtel Prize from Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and new poems are forthcoming in Carolina Quarterly, Pleiades, Smartish Pace and The Literary Review. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children. 

The Poem:
Imagine all the moments of your past (both those you’d love to relive and those you’d rather forget) intent on happening again. They haven’t really “passed thoughtlessly away” at all. They’re just “in a back room… hold[ing] vigil/ elbows propped on the windowsill” looking for a way into the present moment. They might take the form of a memory or a dream, or maybe just a vague feeling that the same things happen over and over. Bazzett’s speaker is haunted by it all, but gently so: the poem’s closing image of rabbits munching clover is all springtime possibility, and isn’t that why we hold our memories so close? It’s hard to know which has the stronger pull, the possibility of renewed happiness or the chance to set a wrong to right.

The Design: 
Title & Name: 24 & 18pt Optima roman
Body: 12pt Helvetica roman & italic
For a poem that addresses the transition between moments, the typefaces needed to be similar enough to suggest a continuum but at the same time distinctly different. Helvetica is a classic modern sans serif – ubiquitous in public signage, helping people get from here to there – but somehow timeless. Optima is ever so slightly serifed, more distinctive but less famous, a first cousin.
Using digital design to create printers plates allowed me to reverse the type of the title for a true mirror effect – something that's impossible with lead type. It seemed appropriate for a poem that loops back on itself "sensing [its own] seeds of return."

Editorial & Design by Architrave Press, St. Louis
Letterpress printed on the Heidelberg at All Along Press, St. Louis