For this post, I thought about what consist of typography and typography as a form in which different mediums present itself to the world, with focus on the difference between prose and poetry.
Blank spaces are one of the most important features of typography. Essentially, type design can be said as ways in which the blank spaces in the medium are occupied and left unoccupied. Aside from when creating an art piece such as a poster or a type specimen where the focus lies in depicting the beauty of the typeface itself, when creating a piece where the substance or the information are at the focal point of the typeface, the decision to manipulate the blank spaces prima facie lies with the designer, i.e., the printer. Yet, there still are few exceptions and the most prominent one have to be the case of poetry. When printing a prose, whichever the purpose of it is —either it be an essay or a news article— composition of the work concerns the typography only. Where the lines form and break and where the contents are situated are determined from the typographic perspective with concerns of the type sizes available and line lengths suitable. However, such is not the case with poems. According to Stillman, “the line is a unit of language in a poem” and the composition of the shape of the line is wholly determined by the author, not the printer (qtd. in Pacheco). In printing prose, the author’s original manuscript and its formal aspects of it, such as where the line breaks are not respected but such cannot be the case with poetry. The form of which the substance presents itself on the medium is carefully devised by the author and is to be respected in order to properly reproduce the original work. If printing a prose is like curating a painting in a frame, printing a poetry is like curating a sculpture in a landscape. What is seen and what is unseen is predetermined by the author and manipulating it comes with the manipulation of the author’s intent and ingenuity. Bernard Newdigate prescribed that “jagged ends of the verse [of poetry] are a condition which no printer’s ingenuity can control” (Thorpe).
Lines are not the only features of poetry which forces the author’s intent to leave little room for the printer’s creativity. Other essential features such as the alignment of the texts, indentation, and the distortion of traditional grammars defines many ways poetry can differ from prose in its printable form. Especially in the postmodern era where traditional bounds of poetry are challenged, such features can be brought to extreme, making the crevice between poetry and prose bigger.
Below is one example of such poems where the interruption of typography must be subsided in the exchange of prudent presentation of the author’s decision:
Notes
Newdigate, Bernard, ‘On printing poetry’ in Thorpe, Joseph, B.H. Newdigate Scholar-printer 1869-1944 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950)
Pacheco, HS. ‘Conventions of Typography Related to Traditional Poetry’ (Reading, The University of Reading, 2006)
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