Mon 10 Mar 2008
It’s 5am - Do You Know Where Your Kids Are?
Posted by Tim under Uncategorized
I was at the office until just after 2am last night, or this morning, or whatever, putting the new issue together. This is what they call “in-sourcing” — we used to pay someone a few thousand dollars to turn our easy-to-manage Word file into a pretty PDF via Quark. Instead, we save that money, and I work 23 hours in one weekend, twice a year. If we had stockholders, I’d say, “It’s worth it to the stockholders.”
But the surprising thing for me, coming at this as poetry person with a science background, is that graphic design and desktop publishing is really fun. Reading submissions can be exciting, or it can be brutal, depending on your mood and where the wheel spins, but working on design has probably become my favorite part of the job. And I have no idea what I’m doing. One of my high school teachers always said, it doesn’t matter what you learn in school, because everything you need you have to learn on the fly.
The summer issue has a special Visual Poetry feature, which includes 38 images — collages, poem paintings, comics, graphic poems, concrete poems. The biggest challenge yet, but well worth it. Wild, varied, random. You’ll see in a few months. And I updated the layout just a touch, for the first time in 10 years — cleaner, and a little more elegant.
Anyway, I don’t know why I’m posting this, but I promised myself I’d get into the habit of using the blog more often.
March 11th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Mr. Green, just so you know who I am, you recently accepted a poem of mine, “The Driving Range,” and I greatly appreciate the recognition. I just read your latest posting and I have to plead with you not to accept criticism from people who express any form of distaste for “weighty-topic free verse.” In my opinion, “weighy-topic free verse” is exactly what we need more of, not less. This type of poetry is what makes Rattle so great. You publish the real stuff, so don’t let the mind-driven passionless highbrow overly-intellectual geekdom out there infect one the only worthwhile zines in this country. This argument stems from the idea that poets should “get off the subject,” well, I think we’ve gotten of the subject a lot in this country, maybe that explains a lot of our current woes. By the way, people like this don’t want Picasso, Picasso is what you publish, what they want is poor, spirit-less immitations of Rauschenberg, Roethko, Pollock. Keep doing what you’re doing.
March 11th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
I’m curious to know what you use as far as software. I’m not a graphic designer either, but find myself involved in projects in which I wish I was. I want a user-friendly program (something that doesn’t require me knowing what a bunch of acronyms means and doesn’t require me to know measurements of images) that is good enough.
March 11th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Thanks for saying that Mr. Escude. (Is it Alejandro Escude? I hope that’s right, I’m out of town and don’t have anything in front of me, but my poor memory…)
Don’t worry, no review is going to make us change our focus. I just do want each issue to be eclectic — we have room for about 100 pages of poetry, so I want to always mix in some formal verse and some humor. But I agree with you about the weighty topics — if we’re not writing about things that important, you have to ask why we’re writing in the first place. Particularly when it comes to politics and social issues; those poems are often the hardest to write without preaching or pandering, but they’re what make poetry matter. My favorite poem we’ve ever published is probably “Baghdad Mon Amour” by Iraqi-exile Salah al Hamdani. But then my second-favorite is a very personal poem by Li-Young Lee…they’re all important in the end.
March 11th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Talia — I use Quark, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you want to get really serious with design. The book I have for it calls itself a bible, and is twice as big. For seemingly no reason at all, it calls files “layouts” and templates “projects”. Fonts and postscript files can be a real pain, too. You can do anything with it, but getting it done isn’t always easy.
I learned by hiring a graphic designer to come in and tutor me for a few hours one day, just working through how I’d make an issue. You can’t really learn how to use software with a book, you have to be hands on and experiment — that’s why kids are so good with computers, I think; they just screw around until they figure things out, whereas adults tend not to give themselves that much leeway.
Most of the industry has actually moved away from Quark and uses In-Design, which they say is much more intuitive, but just as powerful. I really don’t know, though, I’ve never used it, and I’ll probably use Quark forever, now that I’ve got the hang of it.
Anyway, for very basic things, Microsoft Publisher works very well. I always used to use it to make chapbooks and fliers and things like that. It’s part of the MS Office suite. You can just insert or paste-in images, and then drag them around the document. No metrics. There are a lot of pre-made templates for chapbooks, brochures, etc. It’s great for personal use, if you’re just printing out things yourself or at Kinkos. The only problem is that a professional printer won’t take those files, and I don’t think you can convert them into PDFs.
March 16th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Best thing about working over late and hard is that you can, if you’re lucky, get yourself into a buzzed kind of trance; this is where I often get my best ideas. Of course, if you’re unlucky, you have a heart attack. But there’s an element of risk in anything.