Friday, January 12, 2018

provisional Aesthetics

Do aesthetic choices like which font to use in poetry still matter, or have these secondary aesthetic choices slipped into a narrow, black and white flat world of Times New Roman?

For that matter, since we may have lost the connection to handwriting and fanciful typeset, does the artistry of a fine hand count for anything? I still admire beautiful script handwriting when I happen to see it over someone's shoulder, but that is really the only time I am likely to see it.

What have we lost in losing hand-lettering? I'm thinking that some art and meaning is lost in translation. There are different neurological phenomena in play in poetic composition when writing by hand than there are when composing on a keyboard. It is difficult to measure, but I think that poetry has changed in this transition.

Also, what would it mean to the poetry reader to read poetry written in native hand or in calligraphic lettering? Is this an impossible idea, due to modern publisher selection, editing and computer composition? We seem to have shifted performance strictly to reading aloud as performance.

Of course, one may utilize the broadside convention for more 'artful' treatments. Self-publishing is another way to publish a more expressive treatment.

Back to the question, does this matter, and if so to whom? Perhaps interleaving handwritten text into a book would be a provisional way to accomplish the restoration.

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