national poetry month 2010 posted 05 March 2010
Chip Kidd recommended me for this project to do a poster for the Academy of American Poets to promote April as National Poetry Month. I worked with Christina LaPrease and Tree Swenson on this (interestingly I used to do typesetting for Tree, a million years ago), and they gave me several poetry quotes to choose from. I chose, “We make a dwelling in the evening air / In which being there together is enough.” from the poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” by Wallace Stevens.
Being a visual person I interpreted this as a romantic space which is both interior and exterior. But Tree knows more about poetry than I do, and in a very kind and complimentary letter to me she said, “You’ve created a most fitting visual pairing for the Stevens excerpt—giving a clear sense of of the ‘intensest rendezvous’ in the poem. The centripedal energy in the poster also gently urges one to go where ‘we collect ourselves,’ as Stevens advises.”
For me, I am happy that 200,000 of these are printed and being distributed to schools across the U.S. Promoting poetry is something I am more than happy to do.
Printed in CMYK + Gold.
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