Book Cover as Poem

Subsequent to my last post where I said my cover design for The Single Eye was finished, I decided it was too dark and spent the next week lightening it up.

I now have a GIMP file marked "FINAL."  I've even layer-merged and flattened it and exported it as a .jpg.  But . . . I also saved a version with all the layers available for further manipulation.  If I have to.

Yeah, I'm hopeless.  Especially because I'm still not sure I have the exact shade of blue right, and I keep feeling I have to get it perfect.

And my only hope for escaping perfectionism is to think how book cover design is like writing a poem.

Think about it.

A poem uses figures of speech, allusion, wordplay, and so on to evoke ideas and sensations in the reader.  Its meaning enters through the heart and the gut and makes its way up to the brain.  Poetry is not propositional or literal, and its communication of truth is all the more powerful because of that.

A good book cover does the same.  It appeals to the subconscious and invites you without words to click on it or to take it in your hand and open it up.  You think "That's intriguing" without precisely knowing why.

And book covers are like poems in that with each there are any number of ways that inner pull can be produced.

The way I've been fretting over my cover design since early May you'd think I believed there is Only One Perfect Cover for any one book.  I'm not the only one who labors under this burden.  I've been under a lot of pressure from some fellow-authors (it's always fellow-authors) who tell me I have to hire a pro for this, as if any one person could, just by virtue of their being a professional, generate the cover I need.  This is ridiculous on the face of it.  Books are rebranded and covers redesigned over and over as new editions are published.  Are we supposed to believe that only one of those is the foreordained right one and woe to the rest?

Absurd.

No, the challenge is to get this particular cover to evoke the book, just as a poet crafts this particular poem to express the subject he's writing his verses on.  Is there only one poem that can be written on love?  How about war?  How about the futility of this earthly existence (cue violins)?  Of course not.  All these things can have an infinite number of poems written on them.

They need to fit the subject, of course.  But within that framework the poet strives to make her poem as internally-consistent and as perfect an expression of love or war or futility-of-human-existence it possibly can be.

A book cover is the same.  Yes, you want to follow genre conventions.  Put pink frills and flowing script on a noir murder mystery and you'll end up with some pretty annoyed readers.  But once overall genre expectations are met, your cover has no need to be uniquely perfect, only to be well-proportioned, expressive, and consistent within itself.  

And thanks to advent of the ebook, if I should think up a new design that is even more that than what I have now, I can easily switch the new cover out.

Carboot Sale

(Easter Sunday, 1995)

By camper, car, and caravan
they come
Creeping, slowly seeking
Along the sloping open road
Alert with eyes rolled naked
Lest they pass  The very town,
The turn, the way (it's told)
Will lead to reborn treasure, wholeness' heart,
To all they've learned this lurching life
can give.

On this desired, this dream-deferréd day--
This day of all the year, at last arrived--
They find for watchfulness a full reward
As booted angels, flinging back the lids,
Reveal old wares, seen through their eyes
as new.

While in a lonely land so long away
Three weeping wishing women seek the Dead.
With him their dreams have died, yet they would pay
With love's small coin grief’s yearning due.
But finding not, with angel-opened sight
They know the Dead Alive,
Who from his life full treasure gives
Of life and heart and eyes.

While here, numb eyes dead toys caress
And cannot find the road.  The turn, they miss.

_____________________________
by Catrin Lewis, 1995, revised 2014.  All rights reserved

To the Same Musician. Another Poem

Sur le même sujet

Sometimes, I feel drawn to you
As an arrow towards a goal

But each time I attempt my bow,
I miss

It is not that
My aim is bad
But rather, my unsaved friend,
That you do not yet
Live

by Catrin Lewis, March 1985

To A Musician. A Poem

On Not Facing Reality – As Usual

What then, if I should do this foolish thing
And leap into the gulf between gray earth
And all my yet unwrit eternity,
And what if plea of yearning spanless dearth
Of music pulls me unsupported on,
Preferring dissonance, some sound absurd,
Uncertain harmonies to dull accord,
To dry-cut unisons, too often heard?

What if I brace and step into the mist
To grasp a ghost unknown outside a dream,
And wide-eyed, bring a figure vaguely-drawn
To phantom view, and paint what it would seem
Aside from any cool reality?
And feel and touch what only in my mind
Has flesh and bone and solidness of light
And take to heart a thing of unsure line?

Oh God! what then? Could I not fail to fall
Into abyss sans dream, sans light, sans sound,
And would my folly be the only line
To noose me up, a slipped and tightened crown?

Or would I, credulous, go forth to live
These imaged lines, all treachery above,
Called forth from void to firm reality
And Heaven save the mark! find you to love?

by Catrin Lewis, March 1985

Meanwhile . . .

Rewriting, rewriting Free Souls, going all the way back to Chapter 9.  Raising the stakes for my MC and strengthening her motivation to do all this dredging up of her past.   Lots of good, clean, obsessive fun.  Who knows when it will end?

Meanwhile, here’s a random old poem (wish it were a new one, but the Muse distributes her gifts as and where she will) to keep the pot boiling.

It’s called . .  .

Lunacy

To him I’d give the diamond stars
If I could steal them from the night
To forge a chain for his delight
To hang my pendant heart upon

And though a thousand nights were gone,
I’d swear they’d shine as virgin gold:
Through sober days a millionfold
My love as faithful would remain.

But there’s a wildness in my reins
Tonight that seeks the wind’s embrace
And as the clouds give manic chase
I’d seize the moon, to make it yours.

One lunic night to run this course
And laughing, let this milky pearl
Become our toy, the ball we hurl
As evanescent link between.

And then becalmed, I shall be seen
To forge my chain by light of noon:
With you, caprice by fleeting moon;
For him I work the durate stars.

by Catrin Lewis, February 1995; all rights reserved

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De Finibus

Why do I think of quarries
when I think of you
Why of gravel pits
Abandoned, with
Holes of gray useless pebbles
Churning
In murky pools?
Why touch I jumbles of cold
hard things
Ground
By a blank north wind?

Why do these thoughts
Come from nowhere
And lead
To Nothing?

Nothing makes his own reply
I’ll take the stones
And hurl them
Deep deep
down
Within

Till all sink from sight
And I am

Cold and hard and blank
As you.

_________________________
by Catrin Lewis, April 1985; all rights reserved

A Poem, Just to Vary Things a Little

A Last Poem

I walk in a gray March rain
On a path hung with forsythia past their bloom
My heart crumples like
Last year’s leaves     Not
Because you will not be there
But because
I cannot care if you were

The sky widens in wet blindness
I mourn the very loss of pain


There’ll be snow, they say,
Towards morning.

__________________________
by Catrin Lewis, 30 March 1985, all rights reserved