WHAT IS YOUR BOOK COVER TRYING TO TELL US?

After seeing Helvetica.



I'm not a book designer; neither, likely, are you. But most of us poets & poet-publishers have designed and/or provided art for books and magazines that we or our colleagues have published.

Thousands of poetry books are published every year in the U.S. alone. Maybe a thousand of them ever get reviewed. Cover design or artwork rarely comes up, unless it's something provocative--the "Suicide Girl" cover of Fence, for instance.

But a book cover is like clothing. It's a kind of identity marker.

The first book I can remember buying with no prior knowledge of the poet, Ted Berrigan's A Certain Slant of Sunlight, told me that the writing was going to be energetic, if messy, and fun. That turned out to be pretty much the case, though it would take me years to understand that Berrigan's messiness was studiously attained.



A Certain Slant of Sunlight got my attention because, to be honest, up until I saw it, I generally suspected that poetry must be the single most boring art form ever invented. This is no doubt hindsight talking, but what I remember keeping me away from the poetry section all those years was a preponderance of landscape-y or abstract art-y blandness. That and opening up one or two things and being assured that, indeed, the operative word here was "bland."

Once I understood that such a thing as The New York School existed, and further understood that these books weren't really available except in a few choice bookstores, I tended to frequent those bookstores where I would seek out and pick up anything with cover art by, or generally in the style of, Joe Brainard.



This is a successful example of what marketing people refer to as "branding." No period or school of poetry, however loosely defined, at least here in the United States, has ever been branded as succesfully. When I see something today that looks New York School-y, it still has the power to stop me in my tracks, although it no longer necessarily leads to my picking up the book.

Another trend I caught wind of in the late 80s was language writing. The covers of books and magazines were somewhat more diverse in design, but there were certain tropes I began to respond to: The empty industrial landscape photo, usually in black and white. The "all type" cover. One color plus black. The bad 80s desktop publishing look, often with abstract art, but less sophisticated than a Rothko or Pollock. Potes & Poets press and Roof Books of the period always seemed to have that "look."



There were anomolies. The Figures and Sun & Moon, both of which used "high" art as part of the design, and both of which published a lot of writing I was obsessed with. The Richard Longo covers of I think a couple of Bruce Andrews' books. Ron Silliman's What and Tom Raworth's Tottering State from The Figures.

I had a brief infatuation with Burning Deck: the cut-and-paste-y, collage-y look of their books always promised collage-y, cut-and-paste-y writing, which I fell in love with.



I remember it took me a very long time to pick up anything published by Black Sparrow because their uncoated covers gave me the sense that the books weren't actually "ready" somehow.

Then, I don't know what the first book I finally cracked open was, but whatever it was, my bias shifted from "this shit is half-baked" to something more like "this is raw, gritty."

I remember, too, when Erik Belgum and I realized that every single New Directions book published up through the mid-90s had a "pre-smoked" look. Like the book had been sitting for two decades on the bookshelf of a heavy smoker.

When I first saw Eileen Myles' Not Me



my hands were nearly trembling when I picked it up. The writing didn't move me right away--not skimming it in the store, anyway--but I went ahead and bought it. I just assumed that anything that looked that focusedly cool had to be incredible. That turned out to be a wise decision, although I'm not sure that the cover ultimately has the same feeling or sensibility of the writing. No matter; it got me to pick up the book, so it did the major portion of its job.

At the very least, book covers ought to intrigue us on some level, get us to pick the thing up. Really good book design also has some relationship with the work inside. Most poetry books, because they have been designed by amateurs, tend to look, at worst, amateurish. At best, they convey something about the work inside in a way that professional design almost never seems up to.



To my mind, one of the most successful recent covers has to be the Tougher Disguises edition of K. Silem Mohammad's first full-length book, Deer Head Nation. I'm not sure who did the actual design work, but I do know from an interview that Kasey came up with the image, which is a large, inflatable deer head. The design itself is beautiful and simple. The dark blue is both lovely and, well, dark. That makes the deer head below pop in a nice way, but it also says something about the general feeling of the work, which is, on one level, fairly dark.

But not entirely so. It's also somewhat goofy. Which the deer head, especially this particularly kitchy deer head, gets at. The suturing of the two halves speaks both to the writing process and to the two overriding "feelings" of the book: dark and buoyant. The fact that the deer head is as disturbing as it is goofy emphasizes this.

I don't know about the type face choices, which seem a bit arbitrary. But the colors work within the larger image, popping both title and author name nicely. Had I not known Kasey, I'd have definitely picked this thing up.

A much less successful recent cover, Stephen Paul Miller's Skinny Eighth Avenue, published by Marsh Hawk Press



has enough design problems to send me quickly in the other direction. The colors are awful, especially the bad PhotoShop "gradation." That and the type (those shadows!) screams not just DESKTOP PUBLISHING but PRINT ON DEMAND. I actually like the artwork, which I believe was done by Miller's son, Noah--a green snake oozing through a system of black holes. And the book includes artwork by Noah in its pages, so it's fitting on at least that level. But the quirky charm of that snake is lost in a cacophony of bad design decisions, decisions that--to get right to the point, here--have nothing to do with the work inside.

The problems of this cover are those of hundreds of poetry books published in the last decade since the rise of short run printing and print on demand. In the 60s and 70s, amateurish often meant a simple type on a white cover with a hand-drawn black & white image. These items often have a kind of funky charm, and sometimes even elegance, to them.

With the rise of desktop publishing in the 80s, things began heading south. Some of my favorite poetry books from the 80s have garish and kind of awful covers, but because PhotoShop was still a few years off, they're inoffensive compared to what's being done today.

That said, I actually prefer the extremely amateurish look, at least for poetry, to this sort of affair



Susan Settlemyre Williams' Ashes in Midair, published by Many Mountains Moving Press. The Marsh Hawk book screams incompetence, which after decades of reading poetry books, I'm almost sympathetic to, at least with respect to design. What I'll never forgive is blandness.

Whereas I can think of dozens of truly great poetry books that looked like they were designed by drunk teenagers, I can't think of anything really outstanding that looks like the example above. That cover tells me that the work is most likely heavy, self-important, conservative, unadventerous, plodding, MFA-y, humorless, emo, boring, forgettable. The title seals the deal. At least with the Miller book both the title and Noah's artwork have some charm.

In the coming weeks, I'll be looking at a number of books and their covers, focusing mostly on design, but also attending to some of the work itself.

What do poetry book covers tell you? Any particularly great ones come to mind? Have a few favorite awful covers? Have you ever made decisions based on how a poetry book looks?

Let me know!