Project Notes: Chapbook Visualizing and Brainstorming

Mood-board focuses…

Ominous, doom, looming
Space, cramping, vastness, extremes of scale
Shattering, breaking, remolding
Snowflakes, crystals, fractals
Microscopic, intricate
Cosmic, universes, seas, skies, moons
Dust, rust, rot, disuse – a vast space that is not being used
Rawness, elemental – fire, ice, water, dirt, building something from primary elements
Mixing of natural and unnatural, blending of old and new
Stretching nature to the extremes where it becomes unnatural
Delicacy, fragility, timidity, ice, wind
Quiet, walking through winter woods, blowing on the breeze, fresh-fallen snow
Astronomy, spacey, extraterrestrial, otherworldly, immersion
Seeing the unseen and yet seeing its vastness, vastness in a small space
Progressive meditation, move from messiness and contradiction and enmeshment to resolution
Inner proceeding to the outward, illumination from within to outside
Pangs, coming to newness, integration, harmony
Unbundled, unsheltered
Encased, smashed open, growing inward
Glacial, distance, isolation
Specificity, sharpness, acerbic, wind-chopped, crispness
Poems placed on the pages like snowflakes, smooth texture like glaciers
Ecopoetics and an ecopoetic distinction with non-nature as an outlier and yet also an interconnected part of everything

Fonts…

Something thinner, lighter, and neither too sharp nor too blunt
Serif adds an elegant frozen feel, giving it crystal edges while also enclosing the vastness and blocking it in
Ideas: Didot, Palatino, Syntax, Caslon, Baskerville, Sabon
Perhaps an entangled, “handwritten,” type font for the cover

Size…

Poems as snowflakes in the layout – and the rest of the space white
- Keeps the messy, stream of consciousness feel while keeping it focused
Small font emphasizes the smallness
- But, larger book size emphasizes the vastness by preserving the whitespace
Extremes – big, bold, uppercase of the title and the small lowercase of the author’s name, separated by the vastness and the divide of the whitespace

Paper…

Something with a recycled quality but not a recycled color – more a cool undertone
Paper that is not noisy, but if you step on it, it will crunch
A base color with “feature sheets” – a pale blue/gray base with fibers, recycled qualities, and then a few red center sheets to vocalize the extremes (not a bright red, a dried red/orange) in a semi-circular pattern (vis-à-vis geodes, volcanoes, a wildness exploding beyond rigid control, etc.) – a “survival” feel of dried blood

Color and Cover…

“Slightly less black” – not gray, but something navy-ish for the font
- Gradient throughout the pages – starting light and moving dark, or perhaps, starting dark and moving light
Demarcation of “Cold” title being very dark and then fading the color of the text out from there throughout the pages of the book
Visual of the geode on the back cover, but positioned so that its identity as a geode is ambiguous

Form of Printing…

Edition in General…

Overlay the poems with a frosty layer of a vellum page with images and/or Icelandic words (from the manuscript) – honoring that this book is a responsive book to a place and to a translation
Framing the water poems by printing them in light ink on dark paper, set off from the white paper by the vellum paper of the image pages
A simple stab binding with either blue or red string
Icelandic as a ghost-like, backgrounding note throughout the book