Saturday, July 31, 2010

Printers' Ball Poster (Poem: Serenade)

I was unable to attend yesterday's Printers' Ball, the annual free Chicago literary extravaganza summer event that the Poetry Foundation sponsors, but I did participate in a way:  artist Jenny Beorkrem, the founder of Ork Inc., a poster design company, and I collaborated on one of the posters that was displayed at the event.  As part of this project, I selected one of my oldest and most straightforward poems, "Serenade," which I thought would be design-worthy, and this is what Jenny came up with.

The first image is the mock-up of the poster. Jenny wrote that she wanted to play with abstraction (though not because of Seismosis, which she looked at, she told me, after completing her design), and, I imagine, to convey some of the poem's rhetorical, lyric and narrative movement.  The refrain literally--as opposed to just figuratively--pops out:


And here is the final (my name was inadvertently left off the bottom, but the poem is copyrighted, so...):


If any readers attended the Printers' Ball, please do let me know how it turned out!

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