"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

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

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.

"Love Sonnet" by Amy Milton

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

the Poet:
Amy Milton is a writer in St. Louis who graduated from the University of Missouri - St. Louis fiction MFA program in May 2013. She is currently employed in the communications and marketing department at the Missouri Institute of Mental Health. When she is not working or writing, she performs stand-up comedy at various local venues, goes on a lot of hikes, and reads too many science and feminism blogs. Despite all evidence to the contrary, she believes that the most perfect car ever is the 1996 Toyota Tercel and will be devastated when they are no longer available.

the Poem:
Amy Milton is sticking to her iambic pentameter guns, a bandolier of end rhymes draped across her chest. What’s truly dangerous, though, is her sharp, English Renaissance-style wit. Clever turns of phrase like “A selfish love…/ turns organs into ornaments” convey, in compact detail, both the pitfalls and high stakes of love. How frightening, then, to realize the safety of our organs relies on others’ perceptions (“Not who you are, but who you are to me”) something we can’t control. It’s enough to make a person want to pass on love entirely, but “even the most rotten, callous soul/ …has needs and longings out of her control.” So what to do? Despite describing love as warfare (two places where, as the saying goes, “all’s fair”) this poem advocates for the golden rule. Not because it offers a guarantee – there are none of those – but because being kind is most likely to endear you to those you’re closest to, the very same people who can hurt you most deeply. It’s at once selfless and Machiavellian. Ben Johnson would be proud.

the Design:
Body: 14pt Mona Lisa Solid
A poem that addresses intimacy and its pitfalls using the lexicon of warfare should look both delicate and dense, cold and warm. Mona Lisa Solid’s thick vertical strokes, small bowls and tall ascenders create a solid field of hash marks while maintaining significant white space. The apostrophes ride high above the letterforms like balloons or grenades mid-arc. The dots of the lower case i’s could be daggers or candle flames. It’s all in how you decide to see it.

online ISSN 2651-3801

"Of Five Fears: Three of them Light" by Kelli Allen

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

the Poet: 
Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has won awards for her poetry, prose, and scholarly work. She served as Managing Editor of Natural Bridge and holds an MFA from the University of Missouri St. Louis. She currently teaches in the MFA program for Lindenwood University. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, arrived from John Gosslee Books in 2012.

the Poem: 
Why does being human seem to require a stubborn preference to remain unaware of ourselves? Allen knows we’d rather not be illuminated, that the shadows are more comfortable because the low light is more forgiving. If we stay in the shadows, we don’t have to “see a wing, feel/ a ripped feather.” A very old idea, indeed, but with a twist this time: the poem’s own self-awareness. Overlaid on the light and shadow is the speaker’s frustration with cliché. She’s a writer, for sure, and not happy about having to use an overworked set of words. But they are the right words, the best words to express this idea. And so the speaker’s grudging lexicon is a reflection of the force exerted by the “bloated” sun to make her really see.

the Design: 
Title & Name: 24pt & 16pt Futura Medium, Roman & small capitals 
Body: 12pt Futura Condensed Medium, Roman & Italic 
A poem about light should cast a shadow. Not toward the right – that would be too similar to traditional italic. Toward the left, then, the whole poem pulling against its italicized fears: “shadows, light, darkening.” To take the shear and remain legible, the typeface needed to be sans serif and have evenly weighted strokes. Futura’s solid, unfussy letterforms hang together in a cool, dark swath.

online ISSN 2165-3801

"Avocado Lake" by Daniel Mahoney

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

the Poet: 
Lately, Daniel Mahoney has been writing music reviews for bands and albums that do not exist, or exist only in his head. Look for them under your boot soles. You can find him physically in Maine and virtually at http://rusticatordeluxe.wordpress.com/

the Poem: 
It’s appropriate “Those radiant opals/ That mumbled between our legs” don’t show up until the penultimate couplet. They’re the root of the speaker’s masculinity, the thing he’s driven to protect and that drives him to run long after the Indian and Avocado Lake are history. In fact, they propel the speaker through a whole catalogue of abandonment that on a first read seems headed toward regret. But that poem has been written before. That ending would read, “We listened too well,” implying a sense of loss, especially for “distant sons.” Instead Mahoney surprises with the speaker’s unapologetic allegiance to his opals – “We listened well.”– and underscores their power by keeping his speaker performing their imperative: “We ran away,/ Became fathers of distant sons.”

the Design: 
Title & Name: 60pt & 24pt Footlight 
Body: 12pt Helvetica 
Place anchors this poem so the title needed to anchor the design. The last lines of the body slip just a little lower, like the speaker slipping out of town but never really growing beyond the behaviors learned there. The thin strokes of the o in Footlight are off center so the letterform looks like it’s about to roll away. For the story itself the typeface needed to echo the unvarnished clarity of hindsight. Helvetica tells it like it is without getting in the way.

online ISSN 2165-3801