Poetry by Post: Volume 1, Issue 3

The March issue of Poetry by Post reached mailboxes at the tail end of the month (!), and although the timeline was not ideal, I am grateful that poetry is always worth waiting for. Or at least my subscribers are nice enough not to mention otherwise. The featured poem for the month was “No Nose” by Eric McHenry, a writer who I first worked with during the initial round of Poetry by Post that was my thesis project once upon a time.

He is such a delightful poet — a rare modern formalist whose rhymes are acrobatic, clever, and deeply satisfying. This particular poem contrasts homes that have “noses” with the speaker’s, which decidedly does not. So I chose to use a sea of identical triangles to represent houses that all conform to a particular ideal, except for one — where I planted the title.

Despite the lack of a “nose” on the house in question, the speaker points to other reasons for choosing it—namely the trees, the schools, and the neighborhood. So I gravitated toward a sea of stamps featuring homes, trees, and a gorgeous array of greens.

For the subscribers’ names, I used foundational hand in walnut ink. Typically, I go to gouache for all lettering because it’s beautifully opaque and can yield super fine hairlines, which makes the lettering feel really crisp. But playing further on the theme of trees, using walnut ink—which is made from actual walnuts!—felt like the right choice here. The little corners and edges of the letters are less sharp as a result, but what you sacrifice in precision, you gain in rich variability of color within the lettering itself.

And the seals were done in a lovely bronze that echoed the ink color. I wish I’d had the perfect emerald green, but alas! Still pretty, I daresay.

With these mailings, I’m always on pins and needles until I hear from the poet whose work was featured. It’s such a charged and intimate act, to work with someone else’s words and hope to do them justice. Luckily, I received the kindest, most gracious note from Eric the other day—one I’ll keep tucked away forever. Makes every fussy hour spent on these completely worth it.