A Designer's Playground
A room for testing out untraditional solutions and for failing fast
“If you don’t play - you can’t win” is said often enough, not least by online casinos and betting providers. But they actually mean: “if you don’t play - we can’t make a profit”. If designers “don’t play - they lose their creativity”, and then everybody loses, just like: “… if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?” (Matt. 5:13). We all need to be able to create and test out ideas, and see them succeed or fail. We all need a Designer’s Playground.
PUBLISHING HOUSE AS A LABORATORY
2K was started 32 years ago on a firm conviction to always deliver the very best quality typographic design solutions possible. This made me imagine that our endeavour would end up as a small company; after all, most competition between companies is won on price alone.
But I was proven wrong. The very best customers in the world demand the very best quality typographic design solutions. Today 2K has the privilege to serve a considerable number of the best customers in the world.
For that, we are profoundly grateful.
But we would not be able to deliver the very best without allowing ourselves a little time on the Designer’s Playground. For more than 20 years 2K has had several sister companies, all publishing houses. Here we have enjoyed being “our customers”, where there has been room for testing out untraditional solutions, and for failing fast, just like in a laboratory.
We have only created a few commercial successes, but we have always returned refreshed to our true commitment: “To meet the challenges from the best customers in the world.”
FORLAGET MORGENSTJERNE
Today our laboratory publishing house is named Forlaget Morgenstjerne (Morningstar Publishing House). This fall we are delighted to present the publication: Love Poem for Terrorists by Andrea Romeo-Hall. She is not only a brilliant poet, but also a close friend of 2K. Andrea has critically read several issues of 2K/Stories, an effort for which we (and I am sure our readers) are grateful.
Andrea Romeo-Hall was born in Buffalo, New York. She is the managing editor at Cornell University Press and a freelance writer and editor. The mother of two daughters, she lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, Jameson. Love Poem for Terrorists is her first poetry collection.
INTERVIEW WITH THE POET
What sparked your initial love of poetry?
I was in elementary school when I wrote my first poems. I thought I was getting away with something forbidden: how could something so enjoyable count as schoolwork? I was sure my teacher would catch on and cancel all the task credit I was accumulating doing something I loved (we were “allowed” to write as many poems as we wanted). As I began to read poetry I was captivated by the sound of words, visual imagery, and rhythm, as well as the challenge to solve a riddle or interpret the text on multiple levels at once. Family life was not so ordered or comprehensible growing up, and I suppose it was empowering to seek design under chaos. I have always loved both music and math, and poetry, especially writing in form, really clicks in with both.
Who are your favourite, living or dead, poets?
Poetry is like an agricultural product, like pomegranates or figs, and you can savor what happens to be good in that time and place. That could include the best poet on the stage during an open mic you’ll never hear again or the page you flip to in a poetry magazine. I’m reading Inger Christensen’s Alphabet, Remco Campert’s In Those Days, and Donald Hall’s Selected Poems at the moment. When I travel I like to learn about poets of that region. During certain moods I’ll go for Rilke, Stevens, Frost, Thomas, Elliot…
What do most poorly written poems have in common?
Perhaps that the raw material, before it was written, was not a poem in the first place.
What does a poem look like, in your mind’s eye, before it appears in writing?
It is a distinct feeling, a recognition of the poem, a quality of electricity in which you recognize you are in the presence of it before you commit to putting it into form.
Why would anyone choose poems as a tool for communication?
People choose a medium because they are called to it—writing, film, visual art, dance, music all carry that same cosmic goo, the raw material of art. You might choose poetry because you love to read; because you love wordplay and the endless variety words offer; maybe you feel a deep sense of home or self when immersed in words. I do.
How important is accessibility of meaning?
The poem needs ultimate accessibility but not necessarily ready accessibility. It can be hard to access but it should fully reward those who try. I also believe that the poem should be enjoyable purely on its sensual aspects, superficially: visually rich with a pleasing rhythm, good in your ears and good in your eyes, because some days that fits your mood; other days you want to burrow into the meaning because you are trying to work something out in your life and you’re looking for answers, and you trust that poet has hidden a few good ones in there.
Can a good poem be enhanced by the design/lay-out or by illustrations?
Absolutely! I understand this fully after collaborating with 2K and seeing the innovative, spirited interpretations of my stanzas in the design. Being able to send the reader up, down, backward, or forward with design adds a dimension I had not expected. I was stunned by so much creative and respectful engagement when I saw my page proofs. I have been working in book publishing for two decades and have worked on over six hundred books. The difference transformative design makes is undeniable. Intelligent design, like the work that is happening at 2/K, is alive and has a synergy with the text. Illustrative elements added on the pages of my book reinforce the experience I knew I wanted the reader to have; the design that was added is as expressive as words; it made my book better.
Love Poem for Terrorists
Andrea Romeo-Hall
Forlaget Morgenstjerne, 2019
ISBN: 978-87-93742-03-1
48 pages - 145 mm x 250 mm
Sales: klaus@2kdenmark.com
“If there is nothing to live for, there is nothing to die for,” the poet proclaims in “Love Poem for Terrorists,” in a piece that questions the existence of love in the lives of the people who committed acts of terror during the Paris attacks of 2015. In “Grand Ballroom Reception,” a pantoum, a young boy in 1950s Denmark challenges his atheist parents and takes himself to church alone. “How to Forget the City Morgue” places the reader in NYC in 2001, two months after 9/11. In “Let Us Go to Argentina” we join an elderly woman on her deathbed who believes she has returned to her childhood in Buenos Aires. The poems in this book cross oceans and points of view of people wrestling with life and death. Throughout, the theme of the heart returns as a symbol of love (“The Heart as a Pump”) as well as biology (both “Grand Ballroom Reception” and “Brooklyn Super” deal with heart attacks). The sestina “Exit to Tenth Street” is both a portrait of the poet’s father and a riveting true tale of getting lost in the desert. Does everyone make it out? Read this book.