"Troubleshooting Your Advanced Degree" by Michael Jones

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

the Poet: 

Michael Jones teaches at Oakland High School in Oakland, CA. His work appears in Atlanta Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other places.

the Poem: 

The lexicon of the library-dwelling graduate student is perfect for this poem. It serves simultaneously as an expression of frustration and a description of the source. What’s best, though, is the title: as if graduate study is a piece of equipment like a printer, where most problems can be solved by checking cables and restarting the power. Imagine being able to do that with the archived papers of a famous writer: restart to find all the misfiled pieces back in their proper place. Or to upgrade your brain’s software when a new piece of writing refuses to take shape. Alas, some things remain stubbornly analog. 

the Design: 

Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Perfect DOS VGA 437 by Zeh Fernando 

Body: 18pt Kubasta by Kai Kubasta

Everything old is new again, or more accurately, the humanities departments of any given university will have the most outdated technology on campus. Perfect DOS VGA and Kubasta both recreate the dot matrix printing you still might see on a bulletin board here and there. Who knows? Maybe the printers have been upgraded, but this notice, still true, hangs on.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"After After Sappho" by Maggie Colvett

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

the Poet: 

Maggie Colvett is an M.A. candidate at the University of Georgia. She served as 2014 editor of The Mockingbird, the arts and literature magazine of East Tennessee State University. A collection of her poems entitled The World by Memory and Conjecture was awarded ETSU’s Undergraduate Honors Thesis Prize in the Humanities for outstanding work in any area of the humanities. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cumberland River Review, and Still: The Journal. She lives in Athens, GA and Piney Flats, TN, where her family keeps many dozens of chickens.

the Poem: 

“All bicycles/ are your bicycle.” Isn’t that the essence of falling in love? Before, bicycles didn’t even register. Afterward, they are everywhere. And it’s that division, that mark in time that Maggie Colvett understands so well. All other events of life are re-ordered in relation to this one, seminal event and the everyday objects associated with it take on new significance. That’s true of encountering new ideas and writers, too. Images and turns of phrase take up residence in our minds and leave us “swirling in [their] wake.” It needn’t even be a whole poem. It could be a snippet of something from antiquity, something by Sappho, say, that renders all else capital A “After After.”

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 30pt Bordeaux Roman Bold

Body: 14pt Optima 

Sappho is ancient and mysterious – we have just fragments of her work – but she’s also very much alive because her concerns remain current. The typeface for the body of a poem that invokes her therefore had to be timeless but also a little mysterious. Optima provides a clean, modern silhouette but is it seriffed or sans? That depends on whom you ask. Bordeaux Roman provides a flourish to the ragged edge of a layout patterned after ripped notebook paper. The pair of lower case g’s in the poet’s name could be the wheels of a bicycle; those striking capital a’s could be the bicycle’s rider, spine leaning slightly forward on her long arms.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"she tames the small things that consume us" by Dan Sicoli

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the Poet: 

Dan Sicoli, of Niagara Falls, NY, writes about hope and the fallout that comes from offering it up. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks from Pudding House Publications (Columbus, Ohio), Pagan Supper and the allegories. In addition to co-founding and co-editing the literary press and magazine Slipstream (www.slipstreampress.org), his work has appeared in numerous litmags, e-zines, anthologies, and poetry audio recordings including Chiron Review, ONTHEBUS, Quercus Review, Bop Dead City, Barbaric Yawp, Dog River Review, Bathtub Gin, 2River, Rock Salt Plum, Stirring, Up the Staircase, and Nerve Cowboy. He has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Currently, he can be found in local dives, saloons and barrelhouses banging on an old Gibson 335 as a rhythm guitarist with an area rock’n’roll band. In late summers, he oven dries home-grown plum tomatoes.

the Poem: 

Enchantment is still possible in the modern world. What else can explain this woman’s gift? How else to describe this poem’s effect? Not just on the bees and the speaker, but on the reader, too. Is it the idea of being tamed? That it might be possible for another person to calm the wild, buzzing chaos of our inner and outer lives? What a good feeling it is to be fed, to sit in a field knowing the bees won’t sting, to let someone else sort out the details that would consume our time and energy. As long as “no one has her measurement” she’ll stay a source of wonder.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 16pt Didot bold 

Body: 11pt American Typewriter

Bees are rounded creatures with curvaceous flight patterns. Their wings make little clouds around their bodies… so the typeface also needed to be rounded, but with the flourish of a serif to suggest the tendrils of plants the bees service. Didot fits the bill perfectly, as does American Typewriter, chosen for its throwback to a less electronic time. The nuts and bolts of beekeeping haven’t changed all that much – and you still have to develop a knack for it as you would an old typewriter with a sticky key or two.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Last Year Without" by Haley VanJeukelom

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the Poet: 

Haley Van Heukelom is a recent graduate of the University of Northern Colorado. She is the 2013 winner of the Rosenberry Prize, UNC’s award for exceptional student writing. She also won first prize for creative non-fiction in Northern Colorado’s student literary awards. She has published several poems in publications including: Gravel magazine, Isthmus, Lingerpost, and the Four Ties Lit. Review. Haley currently lives and writes in Bend, Oregon.

the Poem: 

We tell ourselves “the possibilities are endless” so that we can cling to what we desire. Our hearts cry “tell me… tell me” we can dance on the roof in the moonlight. Tell me we’ll laugh and wake up happy together. Hope – for companionship, for love – lingers, creating an imagined landscape that can change as quickly as the words “I walked out the minute I knew.” What the poet understands and what makes this poem more than just a series of wishes: our hearts don’t let go of those possibilities so easily. We exchange one imagined landscape for another where the same people play new roles, in this case of longing and loss. In our hurt, we cannot conceive of a world without the beloved so we let the idea of them linger “that whole year.”

the Design: 

Title & Name: 24pt & 18pt Bodoni 

Body: 12pt Bodoni roman & italic

The lines borrowed from poet Richard Siken inspired the choice of Bodoni, the eponymous typeface of typographer Giambattista Bodoni whose advice on design guides much of what happens on Architrave’s pages. Beyond homage, Bodoni’s high contrast between thick and thin strokes echoes the way the poem addresses presence and absence. The title has been kerned to feel open, almost empty like a living room with only people and no couches.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Eternal Flame" by Bruce McRae

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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: 

Every allusion used here is a cliché (the cigar, the Bluestockings, tunnels, etc.) and yet we still smile, happy to be ‘in on it’. It’s as if the poet has just nudged us while delivering an exaggerated wink. And while we might cringe to actually be so nudged, and as much as we might hate to admit it, in truth sex is everywhere in our daily public lives. We don’t talk about it as much as we should, even though “bells are going off all over town.” Or more precisely, we talk about it but don’t really change. We’ve only just entered “the FIRST of the long dark tunnels.”

the Design: 

Title & Name: 24pt Noir-et-Blanc bold 

Body: 14pt Champagne & Limousines bold

The typefaces needed to be a bridge between the Victorian and the modern, something sans serif but still with a self-conscious curve. Champagne & Limousines provides the curves, the o’s and a’s and even the bowls of the lower case g’s all resemble the mouth of the long dark tunnel at the poem’s end. Noir-et-Blanc curves, too, but with a little excess of ornament on the capitals. The kind of flourish a Bluestocking might pencil onto the world-renowned psycho-analyst’s name in her program.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Angel Bones" by Michael Hallock

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the Poet: 

Michael Hallock is a poet and songwriter living in Pittsburgh. “I’m from the magnolia south,” he says, “as you may surmise from ‘Angel Bones’ – but I’m equally at home up north. New flowers to grow and there’s some undeniable connection between snow and contemplation.” Hallock has several folk-rock CDs to his credit, the latest being “Up A Winding Stair” with his band High On Loretta. “Songwriting has wonderful virtues,” he says, “but poetry offers no hiding place, entirely focuses the mind and spirit. It’s harder and scarier. I can’t say why but I relish that challenge. I love the freedom of modern poetry, though I think I use it in an old way – to tell stories – or at least to suggest them, rather than going for strange arrangements of words for their own sake.” Hallock’s poetry has also appeared recently in The Tower Journal, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and is forthcoming in Angle Poetry.

the Poem: 

That dragon at the end of this poem is many things: the mother herself, indomitable, insisting on beauty even in an “unworthy” hotel; the disease that will kill her; and her son’s emotions which leave him barely able to count the beats of the waltz. What’s most dragon-like about this lady, though, is her complete lack of fear. Hallock’s portrait takes pains to show just how close to death, how “full of dust” she is but still, she insists she will be transformed. Here is the parent who rages against the dying of the light, who gives her disease no sway even as it consumes her. It’s tempting to think that such a death would be easier for the survivors to process and yet it doesn’t lessen her son’s struggle at all. Even as the dragon “folds itself into feathers” it keeps its teeth.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 18pt Gill Sans semi-bold italic 

Body: 12pt Gill Sans light

This is a heavy poem full light imagery. The typefaces therefore had to convey how a person can be both present in the world but also leaving it. They also must be able to hold deep emotion without contributing any of their own. Gill Sans’ thin, even strokes leave most of the page white, a light footprint. The title and poet’s name are the anchors, a thicker version of the same typeface.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Watermill Elegy" by Moriah Cohen

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the Poet: 

Moriah Cohen’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations, Word Riot, and Narrative where she was runner-up in this year’s “30 Below” contest. She received her MFA from Rutgers University – Newark and currently teaches at Ramapo College.

the Poem: 

This poem is so tender. Those noisy kids down by the water don’t get told to keep quiet. Neither does the speaker’s younger self get a talking to about his or her behavior. Instead s/he lingers in the spell cast by those glowing cigarettes, remembering a similar night and its loss. It would be easy to stay in that moment, to make what’s elegized mere virginity, but Cohen doesn’t aim her mourning at “what [your hands] could never give back.” Instead her speaker focuses on the youthful ease that allows a person to casually do momentous things and then just as casually fall asleep. It’s the unencumbered mind that’s mourned here, an innocence more subtle than any physical experience.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 24pt Desdemona 

Body: 12pt Didot italic

What’s missing in this poem is most important, so the typeface for the title needed to signal as much. Desdemona’s curves make a beautiful outline of both presence and absence. They also compliment the curves of Didot italic, which manage to be both sweeping (the lower case f’s especially) and regular, like waves in the water downstream from a water mill.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"The 18th Birthday" by Scott Morgan

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

the Poet: 

Scott Morgan is the first registered mutant to graduate from the University of Missouri’s MFA program in creative writing. While masquerading as a normal human, Scott received his bachelors’ degree in English from the same institution. He currently lives in Fenton, MO, where his wife and two children function as a cover identity while he spies on all humanity for GWAR. Somehow, miraculously, Scott has poems appearing or forthcoming in Bellerive, Tar River Poetry and others.

the Poem: 

Light shoots through this poem, but not the easy, pleasant light of a spring graduation day. Instead, Morgan gives us difficult, explosive “lightening [that] squeals” through the car radio and the “smoky remains of fireworks.” These are violent flashes in the night, made beautiful by a father’s view through his son’s eyes: angels in steamy rain, sea creatures in the sky. The tension between dark and sudden light makes palpable the difficulties of the relationship. These two inhabit different worlds within this world, and the work of translation will always be necessary. By the time the speaker heads out to the porch with a six pack, the weight of it all – the future as well as the past – is almost too much. There seems to be only darkness. But like many parents are inclined to do when their child reaches adulthood, this father reaches for another image – because memories are bound to images just as children are bound to their parents – and he is careful to make it another image of light, to leave us with both the beauty of the possibility of translation and the gulf that makes translation necessary. This rite of passage is hard won.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 30pt Goudy Old Style bold 

Body: 11pt Century Schoolbook

This poem fills almost all the available space on a 5 1/2 x 8 inch card, so the poem’s overall heaviness would be apparent in any typeface. The tenderness of the speaker, though, is important so the typeface couldn’t be a heavy one. Century Schoolbook has thin enough strokes that even a solid block of it lets plenty of white space through, appropriate for a poem that ends with the glyphs of fireflies. The title has a different function: it’s both the occasion of the poem and its anchor. It therefore belonged within the body, along with the poet, who has given a voice to a difficult family transition and a complicated kind of love.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"The Farm, The Sky" by Sarah Coury

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the Poet:

Sarah Coury has worked as a small business owner, field biologist, and park ranger. She gardens in the summer and writes in the winter. Her poetry, prose, and nonfiction have appeared in a number of literary journals. She lives with her family in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

the Poem:

Mysteries abound. Who is the “we” who speaks? Did they “buy the farm” literally or figuratively? They’re not part “of the old wood, the rough temple” but they have certainly merged into the landscape. Their long stillness seems almost disembodied, choral, as they observe their environment. They invite us past the decay, beautiful though it may be, to witness something more liminal: a landscape left fallow invites the sky downward, brings it “close, immediate,” refigures it as another form of wildlife. And as exhilarating as the sky falling to earth as a winged creature might be, what is even more thrilling is the suggestion that there are creatures able to lie still enough to witness it. Which circles around to the initial mystery: who speaks?

the Design:

Title & Name: 36pt & 30pt Gloucester MT Extra Condensed

Body: 16pt Show White

The small caps of Snow White are rough hewn (the w’s and s’s especially) which makes each line into a “vast and quiet cedar beam.” Its tiny punctuation amplifies the effect, eliding the sentences together into solid text. Gloucester’s curves and weight provide a slight relief from the blocky body, like a sign that remains upright long after its farm has been abandoned.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Alliteration" by Paul Hostovsky

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the Poet:

Paul Hostovsky is the author of five books of poetry and six poetry chapbooks. His Selected Poems was published by FutureCycle Press in 2014. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac, has won a Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net Awards, 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:

This speaker’s voice is truly ecstatic, attuned so finely to the liveliness of the surrounding woods that he’s compelled to join it. It doesn’t even matter which season it actually was (in fact it was probably all of them at one time or another). All that matters is the feeling of complete release, of surrendering to one’s body so fully that you abandon your clothes, your speech… all the trappings of civilization. The poet is careful to arrange his syntax to mirror the crescendo of climax, so that as the vowels and then the consonants make their appearances we feel the arc as much as read it.

the Design:

Title & Name: 60pt & 36pt Garamond

Body: 14pt Mona Lisa Solid

Everything about this poem is standing at attention so the typeface for the body needed something with exaggerated ascenders and descenders. Mona Lisa delivers, its effect on the page a wood of its own. Pealing the body of the poem away from the left margin is as much for the sycamore’s bark as it is for the speaker’s remembered erection. To frame it all, the title and poet’s name are tree and ground, respectively. Garamond keeps them from becoming too stylized, too unusual to be true.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

Edition 7 Gets Born with a Playlist Reading

Once again we'll be at the Tavern of Fine Arts for our release reading and party.

Reading at 7pm

Scott Morgan
Kelli Allen
Ryan Smith &
Ray Holmes
will read their playlists of favorite Architrave poems, some from E7 and the rest from E1-6. Scott may bring some new work as well.

No one is conferring so we'll see if/where tastes converge!