I have personally decided to go a third, alternative route where I plan to either type out or write poems on paper and decorate them according to mood of the individual poems before placing them into envelopes labelled with the title and a date. A common theme in my poems has been relationships, and as someone who likes to tell a narrative story, I decided that I wanted to write more poems to tell a tragic love story starting at the end of the relationship and detailing the grieving/healing process of the speaker. The poems are to be love letters that are really just for them, written to their lost love. The format would emphasize the feeling of eternal love and heartbreak, as love letters are often held onto for long periods of time as memories of someone. The letter format also provides the personal touch that the poems themselves contain: all addressed to a singular ‘you.’ For example, one of my dream poem focuses on what would be one of the later points in the healing process where the speaker still clearly is wounded by this heartbreak, but they are beginning to accept this and focus their attention on their family. That poem involves a lot of flower imagery, so I plan on trying to incorporate pictures of these flowers in the envelope. Each poem would be personalized in this way, and the dates on the envelope would provide the reader the correct order to read the letters so that a narrative timeline could form. As I continue writing more poems, the rest of my plan will become more clear to me in terms of decoration, though I would like to get a box of some form to contain the letters in, not unlike where my grandfather’s letters from my grandmother were stored in my attic.
I plan on using a chapbook for this project. I think a chapbook will allow me to create a book reflective of my poems that contain as Hall says, ambivalence, opposition, and tension. I can explore these through using multiple textures and medias. Since I plan on using at least two poems, I think being able to flip pages will work best for separating the ideas. I also want to stray from the accordion style because I am not confident in my artistic skills and think a chapbook can be made using less hand-drawn art and use more texture and color. I will definitely be using earthy tones like green and brown and might occasionally throw in some contrasting colors for a pop. I plan on adding some narration too throughout the book to give context to the poems, making them more personable, more substantial and hopefully more relatable.
I am honestly having a hard time choosing how I want my artist book to look like; be. There are two different poems that I specifically favor and one of them is called “Snowglobe” where I tried to work on using metaphor and making the message more hidden, but still deep. I wanted to take this metaphor of my poem and make an actual snowglobe where maybe the base would be artsy and on each side of the snowglobe would be the pieces of the poem. With that being said, I change my mind a lot and I know that is not a chapbook or accordion style book and I am still trying to gather my idea behind it.
My other option I think is to make a chapbook with a stitch binding. I really want to add my photography and poems and put them together, but I just feel like my pictures do not necessarily go with the themes of the poems I have written. I know that I could make it work, but I really want it to be expressive with a personal touch, but I want others to be able to try to comprehend my work in their own way. I also might just do the chapbook idea so that I can add both poems, but I have different ideas that I want for both of them I am struggling to decide. The other poem is on my eportfolio and its called “The Same Sky” but it was one of the first poems I wrote for this class that I just still like over other poems I have written. This “Snowglobe” poem I wrote in my free time, but it took some time and really thinking about being metaphorical so after I wrote it, this whole third option popped in my head. My mind is honestly all over the place and I kind of feel like my ideas are too! I really do want to try to make this snowglobe idea work, maybe writing that poem on the base and then creating an image for the inside with the other poem.
For my artist’s book, I am thinking of going the route of the accordion style. After spending some time in class with Cathleen Miller’s examples, looking through both options and thinking about the feasibility of completing the project without too much stress, I think I can create what I want with the accordion. For one, I love that it still has this shape and feel of a traditional book from the front and back cover, and this was a big point of reference for me when looking at the other examples because I really enjoyed that style of feeling like a book. But the accordion middle, I think, will be best for my ideas of a recurring theme throughout the book to accompany the poems – I think the style will help with the continuity of my content. The other deciding factor I can think of is that while the chapbook style is super traditional and cool looking, the skill level and time it would take for me to make something I feel proud of and look what I would expect it to look like seems a bit out of reach for what I know the time commitment would entail. I can still have that traditional book cover with the accordion and would feel more comfortable actually creating it. I am starting to think of the type of design and what poems would go well with this book form, and I definitely think that some of my nature and imagery-heavy poems would fare well with the continuous and simple imagery that could span along the accordion pages.
I want to do an accordion style book. I did the other style for another class I had made a book in and I’d like to try an accordion style book. I really loved the books we were shown in class and want to get creative with mine like those artists had. I’m not sure what to put in it yet. I think the poem I did for my second poetry exercise is a contender but I also may write another one for it. I’m not sure yet. None of the poems have jumped out and spoke to me about being in this book yet which is making the decision process a bit harder. I’m not sure if I want to put a serious poem into this book or if I want it to be something a bit more lighthearted. I absolutely think the poem I pick will influence the way I want to decorate it. So I have to pick the poem first. But I think I want to go for something a bit more minimalist. At least on the inside of the book. I’m not sure what I want to do for the covers yet. If I want that to be a bit more complex or a color and the title. I think when I have a poem picked the decoration will be easy.
Last year I did the accordion style, I think this time I want to go for the chap cook style. I felt like with what I wanted to do for my short story that the accordion gave me the most space and availability to do that. However, I find that with poetry, I have been more drawn to the chap book style. I feel like with the addition of numerous different poems (almost like chapters) that this will be the way that I want to set it up. I think that I want to keep this book very clean looking, I felt like my last one was too busy. But at the same time I feel like I ave been really drawn to the idea of collage. I feel like with how abstract the wording, idea, and interpretation within poetry can make for a really beautiful and well thought out collage piece. I don’t have a really strict guideline of what I thinking I want to do for my book, but I feel like for the small vision that I currently have, that doing a chap book will give me more opportunity of what I want to create.
For the final artist book, I will be constructing an accordion-style book. The reasoning behind this, at first, was very simple, because I just wanted to create something that I could visualize myself making. The goal was to avoid anything that would challenge my artistic expertise unless we had ample time and supplies for me to make multiple. So, I chose the cleaner, more straightforward option of the accordion-style. Once my reasoning transformed to consider the content of the book, I grew more attracted to the idea of the accordion-style. I plan to keep the book clean, the technical aspects and content included.
The idea that I want to pursue is to have a single, ongoing illustration throughout the whole book that accompanies the text. What is most interesting to me about poetry is how long it has taken me to barely understand it. For that reason, I want to show a single illustration, but also show it transforming throughout the book. I am hoping that this will communicate and express my idea that poetry takes a long time to become familiar with and that it also is a never-ending learning process. I do not believe that the style of the book will play a major role in the meaning of my work, but it will certainly keep it clean and organized and hopefully digestible.
My plan for the writing portion of this project is to include a variety of poems that I have composed over the course of the semester. Maybe I can showcase a couple of the more underdeveloped ones, move into a couple that I am proud of, and finish off with a mix of good and bad. This is all up in the air right now, but I think that this will more than meet my goals for this project.
I plan on creating a chapbook for my artists book. I have decided to go this route because most of my favorite artist book examples have been chapbooks. Additionally, I admire the traditional forms and bindings that can be used for chapbooks. It also seems like chapbooks allow for more textures to be used on the pages which I am interested in maybe doing. A lot of my poems are connected through the common theme of nature, as well as relationships, interpersonal and intra-personal. That’s why I think using different textures in a chapbook may be an interesting way to create synergy along that theme. I also plan on using more than just one poem, and I like the way that chapbooks can separate the poems keeping them individual, but also connecting them together within the covers. I imagine my artists book using common colors found in nature: greens, browns, oranges, reds, etc. I also imagine my artists book using some different textures or textures painted on. I want to do this because “Furies”, the book I looked at when Cathleen Miller visited, used paint with different textures or patterns, such as pressed ferns and cross sections of wood. While the poems are not all precisely about nature, I try to create unity between myself and nature so I feel like this can reflect that perspective that I hold. Also, the poems are about the natural courses of life and typically are viewed within nature. However, I do not want my artists book to be overwhelmingly nature themed, I just want it to have touches here and there so the focuses of the poems is not overshadowed. Besides these themes I am interested in minimalist appearances for my artists book. Maybe using only a few select colors. I do really like the rough edges of pages though to add an older look.
I think I’m going to go with the Chapbook-style artist book. Personally, I think it’s more familiar to me, because I love reading stories and the feeling of turning the page to a new surprise on the next one, and I especially like that idea with the poetry. Plus, I think it’ll be more interesting to have slightly different themes on each page to accompany the two poems that are on each one. I think I’m going to do a sort of “dear diary” or journal-like book because I think a lot of the poems I’m going to use are about my experiences with the past, specifically high school and middle school experiences. Lots of them are about specific people (some positive, some negative) or exploring different emotions that I tried to manage during my time maturing during those grades, and I think making a “journal” of poems would be more conducive to it. I think I’m gonna make little drawings in the margins, maybe drop some tears onto the page with an eye dropper for some of the sad ones, crumple some of the more angry ones up, etc. I’m still not entirely sure of this idea, I might do a sort of Spotify song list-type artist book, but either way I think I’ll go with the Chapbook style. It just feels more familiar and welcoming to me, and I think I’ll be able to do a lot more with it than I would with the accordion-style one.
After thinking about the poems I have written and the different possible types of artist books, I think I would rather a chapbook style.The chapbook style artist book would be a better fit for my poems since they aren’t similar enough in content for me to put them together in an accordion style book. I also want to try a different approach for an artist book this time around since I chose an accordion style for Short Fiction. I enjoyed making the accordion style, but I feel that kind of book is better suited for a short story. I think the chapbook style would offer a more diverse experience of the poems, more of like a showcase instead of trying to create a story with them like in the accordion book. This style would allow me to connect the poems all together by putting them in one book, but also give each poem its own imagery and feel. I’m not exactly sure what I want to use for imagery to represent the poems yet, but I am in ART324 (The Painted Book 3D) and have been able to express my creativity a lot this semester, so I’m sure something fun will come out of it!. I would like to include all of my super personal poems, which usually end up being the free poems we get to write for class. I’ve also written stuff outside of class that I might want to include so I am excited to compile and organize the poems I want to use for this artist book.
Personally I think that I am going to take the chapbook approach to my artist book as I don’t really think the accordion style would capture the vibe that I am going for. I like the idea of having to flip pages rather than have it all stretch out on one strip of paper. With the common theme of my poems sort of being nostalgia, I kind of wanted to go in the decoration of a scrapbook lookalike for my artist book and I feel as though the chapbook would help encapsulate that. Seeing all the different styles and examples that were brought into class really got my brain whirring and excited about starting this process. I was also considering the third route since I liked some of the more unique styles, but to match the scrapbook-ish theme that I was thinking of, a chapbook does make the most sense for me. I think that I want to make my book look very sentimental and almost messy, as a scrapbook is. Not messy in a sloppy way, though messy in a memorable way. I am excited to get to work on this.
I am going to choose the chapbook because I just love the simplicity of it and there is a lot one can do with this format. For me when I saw the red book with the hose titled Homecoming, that really stood out to me. The poems and simple images that sum up or have a deeper meaning to them were really interesting and I was amazed by how one small image can sum up everything. Just like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and that couldn’t be more true than here. So I want to try to recreate this book but in my own way obviously to make these poems pop with just simple images.
12 thoughts on “JOURNAL # 10”
I have personally decided to go a third, alternative route where I plan to either type out or write poems on paper and decorate them according to mood of the individual poems before placing them into envelopes labelled with the title and a date. A common theme in my poems has been relationships, and as someone who likes to tell a narrative story, I decided that I wanted to write more poems to tell a tragic love story starting at the end of the relationship and detailing the grieving/healing process of the speaker. The poems are to be love letters that are really just for them, written to their lost love. The format would emphasize the feeling of eternal love and heartbreak, as love letters are often held onto for long periods of time as memories of someone. The letter format also provides the personal touch that the poems themselves contain: all addressed to a singular ‘you.’ For example, one of my dream poem focuses on what would be one of the later points in the healing process where the speaker still clearly is wounded by this heartbreak, but they are beginning to accept this and focus their attention on their family. That poem involves a lot of flower imagery, so I plan on trying to incorporate pictures of these flowers in the envelope. Each poem would be personalized in this way, and the dates on the envelope would provide the reader the correct order to read the letters so that a narrative timeline could form. As I continue writing more poems, the rest of my plan will become more clear to me in terms of decoration, though I would like to get a box of some form to contain the letters in, not unlike where my grandfather’s letters from my grandmother were stored in my attic.
I plan on using a chapbook for this project. I think a chapbook will allow me to create a book reflective of my poems that contain as Hall says, ambivalence, opposition, and tension. I can explore these through using multiple textures and medias. Since I plan on using at least two poems, I think being able to flip pages will work best for separating the ideas. I also want to stray from the accordion style because I am not confident in my artistic skills and think a chapbook can be made using less hand-drawn art and use more texture and color. I will definitely be using earthy tones like green and brown and might occasionally throw in some contrasting colors for a pop. I plan on adding some narration too throughout the book to give context to the poems, making them more personable, more substantial and hopefully more relatable.
I am honestly having a hard time choosing how I want my artist book to look like; be. There are two different poems that I specifically favor and one of them is called “Snowglobe” where I tried to work on using metaphor and making the message more hidden, but still deep. I wanted to take this metaphor of my poem and make an actual snowglobe where maybe the base would be artsy and on each side of the snowglobe would be the pieces of the poem. With that being said, I change my mind a lot and I know that is not a chapbook or accordion style book and I am still trying to gather my idea behind it.
My other option I think is to make a chapbook with a stitch binding. I really want to add my photography and poems and put them together, but I just feel like my pictures do not necessarily go with the themes of the poems I have written. I know that I could make it work, but I really want it to be expressive with a personal touch, but I want others to be able to try to comprehend my work in their own way. I also might just do the chapbook idea so that I can add both poems, but I have different ideas that I want for both of them I am struggling to decide. The other poem is on my eportfolio and its called “The Same Sky” but it was one of the first poems I wrote for this class that I just still like over other poems I have written. This “Snowglobe” poem I wrote in my free time, but it took some time and really thinking about being metaphorical so after I wrote it, this whole third option popped in my head. My mind is honestly all over the place and I kind of feel like my ideas are too! I really do want to try to make this snowglobe idea work, maybe writing that poem on the base and then creating an image for the inside with the other poem.
For my artist’s book, I am thinking of going the route of the accordion style. After spending some time in class with Cathleen Miller’s examples, looking through both options and thinking about the feasibility of completing the project without too much stress, I think I can create what I want with the accordion. For one, I love that it still has this shape and feel of a traditional book from the front and back cover, and this was a big point of reference for me when looking at the other examples because I really enjoyed that style of feeling like a book. But the accordion middle, I think, will be best for my ideas of a recurring theme throughout the book to accompany the poems – I think the style will help with the continuity of my content. The other deciding factor I can think of is that while the chapbook style is super traditional and cool looking, the skill level and time it would take for me to make something I feel proud of and look what I would expect it to look like seems a bit out of reach for what I know the time commitment would entail. I can still have that traditional book cover with the accordion and would feel more comfortable actually creating it. I am starting to think of the type of design and what poems would go well with this book form, and I definitely think that some of my nature and imagery-heavy poems would fare well with the continuous and simple imagery that could span along the accordion pages.
I want to do an accordion style book. I did the other style for another class I had made a book in and I’d like to try an accordion style book. I really loved the books we were shown in class and want to get creative with mine like those artists had. I’m not sure what to put in it yet. I think the poem I did for my second poetry exercise is a contender but I also may write another one for it. I’m not sure yet. None of the poems have jumped out and spoke to me about being in this book yet which is making the decision process a bit harder. I’m not sure if I want to put a serious poem into this book or if I want it to be something a bit more lighthearted. I absolutely think the poem I pick will influence the way I want to decorate it. So I have to pick the poem first. But I think I want to go for something a bit more minimalist. At least on the inside of the book. I’m not sure what I want to do for the covers yet. If I want that to be a bit more complex or a color and the title. I think when I have a poem picked the decoration will be easy.
Last year I did the accordion style, I think this time I want to go for the chap cook style. I felt like with what I wanted to do for my short story that the accordion gave me the most space and availability to do that. However, I find that with poetry, I have been more drawn to the chap book style. I feel like with the addition of numerous different poems (almost like chapters) that this will be the way that I want to set it up. I think that I want to keep this book very clean looking, I felt like my last one was too busy. But at the same time I feel like I ave been really drawn to the idea of collage. I feel like with how abstract the wording, idea, and interpretation within poetry can make for a really beautiful and well thought out collage piece. I don’t have a really strict guideline of what I thinking I want to do for my book, but I feel like for the small vision that I currently have, that doing a chap book will give me more opportunity of what I want to create.
For the final artist book, I will be constructing an accordion-style book. The reasoning behind this, at first, was very simple, because I just wanted to create something that I could visualize myself making. The goal was to avoid anything that would challenge my artistic expertise unless we had ample time and supplies for me to make multiple. So, I chose the cleaner, more straightforward option of the accordion-style. Once my reasoning transformed to consider the content of the book, I grew more attracted to the idea of the accordion-style. I plan to keep the book clean, the technical aspects and content included.
The idea that I want to pursue is to have a single, ongoing illustration throughout the whole book that accompanies the text. What is most interesting to me about poetry is how long it has taken me to barely understand it. For that reason, I want to show a single illustration, but also show it transforming throughout the book. I am hoping that this will communicate and express my idea that poetry takes a long time to become familiar with and that it also is a never-ending learning process. I do not believe that the style of the book will play a major role in the meaning of my work, but it will certainly keep it clean and organized and hopefully digestible.
My plan for the writing portion of this project is to include a variety of poems that I have composed over the course of the semester. Maybe I can showcase a couple of the more underdeveloped ones, move into a couple that I am proud of, and finish off with a mix of good and bad. This is all up in the air right now, but I think that this will more than meet my goals for this project.
I plan on creating a chapbook for my artists book. I have decided to go this route because most of my favorite artist book examples have been chapbooks. Additionally, I admire the traditional forms and bindings that can be used for chapbooks. It also seems like chapbooks allow for more textures to be used on the pages which I am interested in maybe doing. A lot of my poems are connected through the common theme of nature, as well as relationships, interpersonal and intra-personal. That’s why I think using different textures in a chapbook may be an interesting way to create synergy along that theme. I also plan on using more than just one poem, and I like the way that chapbooks can separate the poems keeping them individual, but also connecting them together within the covers. I imagine my artists book using common colors found in nature: greens, browns, oranges, reds, etc. I also imagine my artists book using some different textures or textures painted on. I want to do this because “Furies”, the book I looked at when Cathleen Miller visited, used paint with different textures or patterns, such as pressed ferns and cross sections of wood. While the poems are not all precisely about nature, I try to create unity between myself and nature so I feel like this can reflect that perspective that I hold. Also, the poems are about the natural courses of life and typically are viewed within nature. However, I do not want my artists book to be overwhelmingly nature themed, I just want it to have touches here and there so the focuses of the poems is not overshadowed. Besides these themes I am interested in minimalist appearances for my artists book. Maybe using only a few select colors. I do really like the rough edges of pages though to add an older look.
I think I’m going to go with the Chapbook-style artist book. Personally, I think it’s more familiar to me, because I love reading stories and the feeling of turning the page to a new surprise on the next one, and I especially like that idea with the poetry. Plus, I think it’ll be more interesting to have slightly different themes on each page to accompany the two poems that are on each one. I think I’m going to do a sort of “dear diary” or journal-like book because I think a lot of the poems I’m going to use are about my experiences with the past, specifically high school and middle school experiences. Lots of them are about specific people (some positive, some negative) or exploring different emotions that I tried to manage during my time maturing during those grades, and I think making a “journal” of poems would be more conducive to it. I think I’m gonna make little drawings in the margins, maybe drop some tears onto the page with an eye dropper for some of the sad ones, crumple some of the more angry ones up, etc. I’m still not entirely sure of this idea, I might do a sort of Spotify song list-type artist book, but either way I think I’ll go with the Chapbook style. It just feels more familiar and welcoming to me, and I think I’ll be able to do a lot more with it than I would with the accordion-style one.
After thinking about the poems I have written and the different possible types of artist books, I think I would rather a chapbook style.The chapbook style artist book would be a better fit for my poems since they aren’t similar enough in content for me to put them together in an accordion style book. I also want to try a different approach for an artist book this time around since I chose an accordion style for Short Fiction. I enjoyed making the accordion style, but I feel that kind of book is better suited for a short story. I think the chapbook style would offer a more diverse experience of the poems, more of like a showcase instead of trying to create a story with them like in the accordion book. This style would allow me to connect the poems all together by putting them in one book, but also give each poem its own imagery and feel. I’m not exactly sure what I want to use for imagery to represent the poems yet, but I am in ART324 (The Painted Book 3D) and have been able to express my creativity a lot this semester, so I’m sure something fun will come out of it!. I would like to include all of my super personal poems, which usually end up being the free poems we get to write for class. I’ve also written stuff outside of class that I might want to include so I am excited to compile and organize the poems I want to use for this artist book.
Personally I think that I am going to take the chapbook approach to my artist book as I don’t really think the accordion style would capture the vibe that I am going for. I like the idea of having to flip pages rather than have it all stretch out on one strip of paper. With the common theme of my poems sort of being nostalgia, I kind of wanted to go in the decoration of a scrapbook lookalike for my artist book and I feel as though the chapbook would help encapsulate that. Seeing all the different styles and examples that were brought into class really got my brain whirring and excited about starting this process. I was also considering the third route since I liked some of the more unique styles, but to match the scrapbook-ish theme that I was thinking of, a chapbook does make the most sense for me. I think that I want to make my book look very sentimental and almost messy, as a scrapbook is. Not messy in a sloppy way, though messy in a memorable way. I am excited to get to work on this.
I am going to choose the chapbook because I just love the simplicity of it and there is a lot one can do with this format. For me when I saw the red book with the hose titled Homecoming, that really stood out to me. The poems and simple images that sum up or have a deeper meaning to them were really interesting and I was amazed by how one small image can sum up everything. Just like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and that couldn’t be more true than here. So I want to try to recreate this book but in my own way obviously to make these poems pop with just simple images.