WHAT IS YOUR BOOK COVER TRYING TO TELL US?
PART SIX: CAN I GET THAT IN BEIGE?



Allen Bramhall writes:

I'm thinking: the rightness of a cover is defined by the reading. one might just eschew thinking that the work is slagged because of scruffy cover, s'il vous plait. when the poetry lights up, the cover will too. but not vice versa.

Agreed. Again, I can think of any number of poorly designed books of poetry that I will never part with, even if the work gets reprinted in a nicer-looking format. And I agree with the idea that the values of the work can, to some extent, reverse-infuse even a bad or wholly “off” cover.

I’m less interested in this phenomenon at the moment—which is particular to individual readers—than I am in thinking about the kinds of values that are expressed through a book’s design, and the extent to which those values click with the work, sensibility, ideas, etc., of the poetry and its maker.

What do these designs tell us about our biases and our values?

It occurred to me that cliché might be an interesting indicator of value. I asked people on the Flarflist to send me lists of poetry book cover clichés, and what they thought those clichés expressed. Here are a few, with my own thoughts following each.

Bill Luoma offers: “buff, text only. i’ve been to france!”



There is a particular look that Bill is pointing to here, which I think may reference Éditions Gallimard ca. 20 years ago or so, specifically, and certainly 20th century French book design, generally. That said, text-only covers in the U.S., especially on letter-pressed chapbooks, might be a kind of “default,” especially for those who feel that anything more elaborate might distract from the work itself.

But “default” shouldn’t be conflated with “neutral.” A completely blank cover says something. (The only example of a completely blank cover that I can think of is John Perrault’s Lucky, from 1969. And in that case, the cover is actually olive-green, the color of the cover stock itself.) A cover with text, and maybe a box around the text, says something else. And the cover above, Jennifer Moxley’s Imagination Verses, says something very specific, and it’s not quite the same information we get from the example below:



Alison Stine’s Lot of My Sister, although Stine’s book is part of a series that all have a similar look, whereas the Moxley was the author’s choice. I’ve always assumed that the Moxley, because it feels like such a direct quote, must be at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

The notion that a cover might be arbitrary or neutral tends to fall apart, especially when we look at things that we first imagined were similar. Another “default” cliché:

Kasey Mohammad offers: “Tasteful detail from nineteenth-century landscape painting or Dutch still life (or other museum-y genre). Ashbery does this a lot. Though I have to admit, I'm sort of a sucker for it.”



Picking up on this, Shanna Compton elaborates: “‘classic’ contemporary poetry is solid colored ground with painting in a rectangle, being ‘beautiful’ or ‘evocative,’ whether landscape or figurative, or jeez a still-life of fruit or something. There are so many variations on this it boggles the mind. … The BAP series uses this format, but didn't invent it. See several of Mark Strand's books (tho not the most recent ones, they finally modified). Or Derek Walcott's (which feature his own watercolors). … This template is meant to convey ‘seriousness’ and ‘literariness’—and the only time you'd ever see it on fiction or nonfiction is if it's by dead authors, i.e. ‘a classic.’ But poetry somehow doesn't get that it feels pretty stodgy.”

I don’t have too much to add to that, other than to agree that, in both the all-text (with limited design elements) and in the often boxed-in, always tasteful, use of high art, that seriousness is the operative concern here.

I agree with Shanna that this all “feels pretty stodgy,” but I also recognize this feeling as a reader-end value, which has nothing to do with why poetry books are designed like this in the first place. Seriousness, literariness, and often their 2nd cousin, elegance, are values held almost sacred by the majority of poetry culture, at least those for whom print publication is the great Promised Land. If that’s the reason these books look the way they do, then count failure of the imagination among those sacred values.



I offered the list a cliché of my own: The Map, which I associate with Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, and a kind of blow-hard-y Americana, generally. James Thomas Stevens, whose cover that is above, isn’t a blow-hard—and, truth be told, most who’ve used The Map probably aren’t. I’m not sure what The Map signifies, generally, and I’m not convinced it embodies any single idea from book to book—here, it’s obviously got something to do with the title. The most common use, in any event, tends to be with poems that foreground geography and/or locale.

More on this tomorrow. What are some of your favorite poetry book cover clichés?

Meanwhile, this just in, from Sharon Mesmer:

Cy Twombly-esque scratchings on a chalkboard
Palimpsest
Architectural details
The canals of Mars
______________________
= "Hi, I just got a MacArthur"

* * *

Dew on a branch
Spider web with dew on it
The beach, with an empty chair
Shell or shells (with dew on them)
___________________________
= "Hi, I'm contemplative, humorless and profound, and I won a contest"

* * *

Gritty, urban-looking brick building, perhaps with graffiti
Old person's face
Old woman in babushka
Street people (preferably women)
___________________________
= "Hi, I've had a hard life and I'm going to tell you about it in discursive, oblique ways"

* * *

Face or eyes of a wolf
Turtles
Anything with snow on it
Chickadees on a branch (with dew on it)
_____________________
= "Hi, I'm a cross between Gary Snyder and 'America's Got Talent'"