In March last year I was driving
through tree-lined Norfolk country lanes with Michael Mackmin, on the day of
the nature tour prize for the Rialto/RSPB poetry competition. I said I’d recently started to feel
frustrated that I couldn’t recognise different trees in winter. So Michael enumerated them as we drove past:
ash, oak, oak, ash, oak, some alders over there, poplar, poplar, poplar,
oak…
Spring was about to burst out, but when
winter came I started trying to learn the shapes of trees. I think I am now quite good at oaks. The same thing happened with birdsong a few
years ago – beyond already known songs by woodpigeon or blackbird such learning
is a slow and painstaking process for someone with a poor ear. The wren, singer of the same set of
flourishes again and again, was my first success.
When HappenStance publisher Helena
Nelson announced that she was producing a pamphlet on typesetting poetry by
poet and Dark Horse editor Gerry
Cambridge, I was intrigued. The Rialto is expertly designed by Nick
Stone, so when we get the pdf proofs back it’s mostly to check for missing
lines, verse breaks gone wrong, etc. Our
occasional discussions about the presentation of a particular poem on the page
are my only experience of the design side of typesetting... Apart from choosing Verdana for this blog
because it’s plain and supposed to be easy to read online. And having a discussion with Helena Nelson about
whether a long-lined poem in my pamphlet should be printed vertically rather
than horizontally – she said No, it would draw attention to the poem’s vertical
appearance rather than the contents.
I’d already benefited from
Cambridge’s typographical skills because he’s advised HappenStance on
design. I ordered The Printed Snow (here) and it was austerely elegant, as one would
expect. With lovely blackberry-coloured
end papers. One feature of it is this:
in several places the first word in a line has an inverted comma before it, to
open a quote. The inverted comma lies
slightly outside the left-hand margin – it sticks out. Presumably that’s a characteristic of this
particular typeface, Trinité 2 Roman.
Would I have noticed, had I not been reading about typography?
The
Printed Snow soon
had me reaching for the pile of poetry books on my table (two piles actually)
to look at, and for, things I hadn’t noticed before. Or things I’d only noticed
in poorly typeset books: as Cambridge says,
Setting inner text is a scrupulous
business in which, like the art of forging banknotes, a creator’s invisibility
is a sign of success.
One of the pleasures of reading this
pamphlet-monograph is its physical form.
It’s nice, and rare, to hold in the hands a short, pocketable piece of
non-fiction prose that’s not part of a newspaper, magazine or website.
The pamphlet isn’t a comprehensive
treatment of the subject but an “idiosyncratic essay” (with a bibliography for
those who want more). Here are some of
the things that struck me, a mix of unknown unknowns, unknown knowns and known
unknowns.
Design perfection on the computer
screen may be something else entirely on the page. A pamphlet page can be read almost to the
central gutter but the binding of a paperback reduces page width by up to 20mm.
Some typefaces are more economical
than others with space across a page.
Typesetters enjoy finding or making
links between the typeface chosen and the writer and/or subject; Cambridge used
a typeface called Tacitus (after the Roman historian famous for his irony,
unusual vocabulary and the extreme compression of his writing) in a pamphlet on
the Gaelic poet and scholar Derick Thomson.
There is a typeface called
Turnip.
Unlike prose blocks in a book, the
varying shapes of poems can lead to ‘show-through’ of type from one page to the
next. I suppose I had noticed this, but
not enough to… notice.
Poetry dilemma: do you set the same
left-hand margin on each page, or use an imaginary centre line to place the
poems? The latter may be necessary for a
mix of long- and short-lined poems.
Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap
happened to be on the table: I opened it and read with new eyes. Her poems may be mostly blocks but the line
length varies from middling to quite long.
Cape, her publisher, chose the centred approach. This does – now – look slightly odd when one
leaves through, but the other options would have been to squeeze the
shorter-lined poems right over to the left, leaving lots of space on the right;
or turn the longer lines over, ie run them on into the next line. “Love” must have been maddening to arrange on
its first, full page: the left-hand side of it almost disappears into the
central gutter so as to accommodate all the lines … except line 1, which has to
be turned over. But then this is how the
first few lines read:
I had thought it was something we
were in. I had thought we
were
in it that day, in the capital
of his early province – how could we
not have been in it, in our hotel
bed, in the
cries through the green grass-blade.
The initial awkwardness gets read
into the argument of the poem. In this
case that works rather well with the emphasis on the forced line break “we /
were”, two key words for the poem and indeed the whole book. So I’m now almost wondering if the
turning-over here was deliberate.
Cambridge compares writing poetry
and typography because both “require almost neurotic levels of attention to
detail”. I’m no designer but am now engaged
in noticing typesetting, along with birdsong and the silhouettes of winter trees.
PS: I know the text of this blog post
starts too far below the title. I’ve
been messing around with it for 15 minutes and have only made it worse…
PPS: I’ve just seen that Dave Coates
(at Dave Poems, see the blog list on the right) has won this year’s Saboteur
Best Reviewer Award. Hooray!! and
congratulations to him.
