Saturday, December 14, 2002

Like George Stanley’s forthcoming selected poems, A Tall, Serious Girl, Besmilr Brigham’s selected short poems, Run Through Rock, derives its title from the final poem in the volume. The book has a spare, almost austere beauty to its design. The front cover is a color photograph printed in landscape format about two-thirds up the page, behind which runs a vertical band of gray that holds (above the photo) the book’s title and (below the photo) subtitle, author & editorial information. You can just barely discern that this pattern forms a cross. The photo itself is of a rock atop some exceptionally dry & tire gouged red clay earth – in the deep background, so soft focused as to be open to interpretation, are either clouds or hills underneath the deep blues of a storm sky.

The back cover presents the same pattern – the photo is now a color negative – as the front. Underneath the photo, printed in the grey column (that same subtle cross) are some lines from one of Brigham’s poems.

Run Through Rock is a careful, professional project in book design – its only flaws (& you will see that I’m reaching to find any) a couple of lines here & there that are ambiguously leaded, making it not quite clear whether or not a new stanza is upon us. As is equally evident with its 2000 reissue of Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Lost Roads has become one of the premier publishers of American poetry. Every attention to the detail of the book is taken & the eye to presentation is exact.

The cover of Battlefield uses black, white & red very carefully to achieve a message of visual power. An African-American male stares out from behind a black foreground that is shaped with just enough of an angle to suggest a book that has been opened (it may be a public monument of some sort). Atop this monument or book, which takes up a little more than the bottom half of the cover, just to the left (and to some degree in front of)  of the young man is a metallic ball, just slightly smaller than a basketball – if you pay close attention, you will see the photographer reflected in the ball, the background behind her – the photographer being Lost Roads publisher C.D. Wright’s sometime collaborator, Deborah Luster – suggesting a farm field.

Thrusting up from the bottom of the front cover – I’m choosing my words carefully here – is the same sort of column that appeared beneath the photo on the Brigham cover, with the author’s name dropped out in white toward the bottom and the book’s title above it as the column moves from black to a rich deep red.

The back cover has a small square photo centered roughly three-quarters up the page: two toddlers, Caucasian, playing with a slightly older African-American boy in some kind of camp setting – there is a tent in the background. The boy on the left, it turns out, is the author. The photograph is very much a retro snapshot, almost surreal in its fuzziness. It’s surrounded with a thick bright red border against the otherwise black field of the cover. Below, as with the Brigham volume, a few lines of poetry &, at the very bottom in a different type, the ISBN data.

As moving a graphic design as the cover of Battlefield is, it may be tame in comparison to the one printed on the 1977 first edition of the volume, back when Lost Roads was the name of a magazine – Battlefied was technically issues 7 through 12, all in one volume – and the publisher was then called Mill Mountain.

The books aren’t even the same size: the 1977 edition taking up 542 pages, the 2000 edition offering the same number of lines in just 383 pages. While the two volumes are different dimensions – the 1977 edition is more squat – the primary difference is that the earlier edition is typed & not typeset.

If the interior of the 1977 edition looks rough, it’s nothing in comparison to its cover – the same color ensemble as the 2000 edition, but used to radically different effect. The background is white, not black, the typeface all in lower case red – another way of emphasize the rawness of the book. And the photograph. Well, the photograph. Uncredited & perhaps lifted from a newspaper, it shows a stack of corpses half covered by a tarp, all Vietnamese women & children, their faces bloodied, eyes open seeing nothing. Cowering in the upper right hand corner of the photograph are two other women overcome with terror & grief. At the upper left, a single leg (foot pointed away from the bodies) to suggest a larger context – someone is still paying attention to something else. The verso says only “Photograph taken the last day of the war, Tan Son Nhut Airport, Saigon, April 29th, 1975.” Of the 4,000 volumes of avant & post-avant writing I have lying about the house, none – not even the Clay Fear collection of Kathy Acker imitations with the blow job on the cover – comes close to this one for its evocation of an involuntary visceral response.

Frank Stanford was still alive when the first edition of Battlefield was issued & it may even be his design – no credit is given. The cover of this edition foregrounds the word “battlefield” in the title, where the 2000 edition is more ambiguous & points to that ambiguity established by a noun phrase that includes not only “battlefield” & “love,” but also “moon” & the possibility of address.

There is something so extreme about a 542 page book that is typed rather than typeset – its characters equal in width, the page unadorned to the point of a stark ugly beauty. The design of the first edition accentuates everything about the text itself that can be called raw. This is worth noting for a couple of reasons. One is that by 1977, when this book was coming out, Stanford had been in college for several years & was well on his way to writing pretty standard MFA mill poetry. Committing to this “early” work was much more than playing on his precociousness as a teenager, it meant admitting the legitimacy of this completely Other vision of what poetry could be. In 1977, there was nothing you could find even remotely close to what Stanford was doing – the surrealist scene around Franklin Rosemont, for example, or the Beat variant around Philip Lamantia, are both quite tame in comparison to Battlefield. Further, in the age of the internet, after Bill & Hillary, & after Lucinda Williams & C.D. Wright, it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine just exactly how removed from mainstream literary culture Arkansas was in the 1970s.

The 1977 design of Battlefield appears calculated to make the book leap out at the reader from every possible angle. 25 years later, in an era when college students in Western Massachusetts conduct daylong readings of the entire volume, the 2002 design may very well be the right one to permit readers to pick up new threads & possibilities in this dense work. Each edition shows why it’s a wise book that understands its cover.