The implicit theme of gifts (gift of life, gift of family, gift of nature, etc.) came about many times throughout “Night Light,” and that is why I made this image a gift.

We as people all have gifts: da Vinci for painting, Mozart for composing, Justice for writing beautiful poetry. It is one thing to have a gift, it is another thing to share that gift with the rest of the world; to allow them to see it, hear it, read it, taste it, and keep it with them, to use when they need a connection.

Most noticable is the large black nine that makes up most of the logo. The word “pod” fits perfectly around the middle of the nine, leaving the logo looking balanced. Finally the last touch is the very slight appearance of light shining out of the “o” in the word “pod.” This gives the hint that the company has something to do with lighting.

The number nine has more to do with the logo than just the company name. It could be said that just as nine encompasses all of the first nine numbers, the light should encompass, or illuminate, everything that needs to be illuminated.

This logo is clever, simple, and gives just enough clues as to what the company does. I would like to use the concept of nine, and this clever precision to represent multiplicity in “Night Light.”

Isn’t that what we all strive for as writers? Doesn’t that outline the principles of multiplicity? The number nine makes a connection with every part of a three-dimensional space. It has stronger connections with some numbers, such as the number three, but still has a connection with all of the other numbers nonetheless. “Night Light” succeeds in that regard, because without a doubt, every poem in there has a connection with another poem in there, and also with an aspect or image from the outside world. This is why I’d like to try to incorporate the concept of nine in my emblem for multiplicity.

Calvino says to treat the “novel as an encyclopedia, as a method of knowledge, and above all as a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of the world.” To me, this means basically this: do not let your piece of writing stand alone; allow it to be part of a network of other novels, poems, songs, websites, and so on. Find ways of connecting your work to other works, and most importantly, find a way of connecting the parts of your work to its other parts.

Donald Justice succeeds highly in this area. It is often that a collection of poetry is as connected as “Night Light.” Each poem is connected to another because of the recurring themes of family and time, both of which multiply, as seen in “The Grandfathers” and “Dreams of Water.” Justice also calls upon references from past pieces of literature in some of his poems, and thus connects his work with that of other great writers. One example is “Orpheus Opens His Morning Mail,” in which Justice retells the story of Orpheus by way of explaining what letters he would receive in the mail.

Justice exemplifies the meaning of multiplicity because his collection of poems is more than that. It is a means of connecting himself and his readers to many other parts of the world.

This emblem represents the duality between words and images, and expresses the number two by the two lenses of the glasses. The point I was trying to make is that there is a difference between just reading text, and going further to imagine what the text is expressing. I think it is the goal of every poet to create poems that are more than just words on the page. “Night Light” is an example of how this should be done, and that is why this concept was such an integral part of my final emblem.

The only answer that I have come up with is this: it is intriguing. If someone doesn’t know right off the bat what the icon is for, he or she is immediately intrigued. It is so simple that it could seem familiar to just about anyone. It gives the viewer enough to make them want to research it further, but not so much that they lose interest.

I also like how it plays with the concept of duality, both with colors and with shapes. The green and white are so distinct from one another, and so are the shapes of the circle and the straight lines on the top and bottom of it. The brightness of the light and the strength of the rings are represented by the white, although one might not understand this the first time looking at it.

I would like to create an emblem for visible that both intrigues the viewer, and also represents concept of duality by way of the number two.

This got me thinking. When I am reading a poem and I come across a description, a conflict arises: there are no illustrations, so I can’t see what the poem is describing. This conflict forces my brain to seek a resolution, and what does the resolution always happen to be? Immagination. This conflict forces my immagination into conjuring up an image – a mental picture – to accompany the language in front of me. This conflict between words and images is the kind of duality that I would like to represent in my final emblem by using the number two.

For me, visibility and poetry are immensely intertwined. The first thing that ever appealed to me about good poetry is that I could not only read the poem, but I could see the poem. A poem succeeds if it conjures up clear, vibrant  images in the reader’s mind: images that evoke other images, images that evoke memories, images that keep you company. The poems in “Night Light” do exactly this.

For example, in the poem called “Time and Weather,” Justice lists things that are worn away by time and weather. The list includes “houses that our fathers built,” “ghostly furniture,” “sad sofas,” “tears of boredom or of guilt,” “fraying mottoes,” “stopped clocks,” and “damp parlors.” Every item in this list not only evokes a different image, but a different emotion. This poem is able to express the passing of time, lonliness, longing for lost loved ones, and so on, without ever mentioning one of these things. Justice was the master of taking abstractions, and expressing them through images that are visible in the mind’s eye.

The pointed finger is the main focal point of this emblem. I thought it was a subtle, yet effective way to represent exactitude. When a person points a finger at something it is basically saying “that, yes, exactly that” and that is the point I wanted to get across. Also, it is upright as if signifying the number one, which is another aspect I wanted to incorporate.

I wanted to use the image of the hand because in “Night Light” there is a poem called “Hands,”  and this poem describes many precise movements that hands typically make. The diction is simple and understandable, and yet the poem appears to be talking about much more than just hands. The last four lines read:

“And all that they grasp is air.

Think of the hands as breathing,

Opening, closing. Think of

The emptiness of hands.”

This poem utilizes the principles of exactitude by clearly describing actions of the hands, while at the same time never losing imagination or creativity.

I added the firefly to the hand to further drive home the concept of exactitude. Not only is the finger making a point, but conditions are so exact that something as small and fragile as a firefly was able to land on the finger. Also, I wanted it to be a firefly to keep with the ideas of light and comfort. Afterall, what is more exacting or comforting that catching fireflies?

The other part of the logo that I found appealing was the way that it looks as if the person is growing out of the hands of another person. This appears to be representative of how giving produces growth, and vice versa. The concept of comfort makes yet anther appearance in this logo, because the person is being held and taken care of by the larger hand. This logo is simple, in its solid black and white design, and clear enough to get across the message of the organization that it is associated with. It definitely helped me come up with my design for the quality of exactitude in “Night Light.”

This relates to “Night Light” because while all of the poems collected in it are parts of the entire collection, they all came from the same one source (the creative mind of Donald Justice) and had the through-line of the idea of comfort. He is the exactitude of “Night Light,” and the glue that turns the emptiness of the poems alone into the wholeness of the collection. It’s my goal to be able to incorporate Donald Justice, the emotional reaction of comfort, and the concept of one into my final design for exactitude in “Night Light.”

Calvino has three main points that he uses to describe the quality of exactitude:

I struggled with a very long time with how to connect a collection of poems with this concept of exactitude. All of the poems in this collection have different subjects, stories, forms, and so on. How could I find anything “exact” about a group poems that are so varied? It seemed impossible.

Finally it occurred to me that although these poems may all be very different, they do have one thing in common: they were all written by Donald Justice. What makes my project different from everyone else in the class’s projects is that exactitude doesn’t come from the work itself, but rather from the individual writing style of the author.

Once I came about this conclusion it became clear for me to see that Donald Justice utilizes the principle of exactitude in all of his poems. Each poem breathes on its own, separate from the others, and has a clear direction of both where it is going, and what it is trying to say.  Justice’s descriptions evoke vibrant images that stick with the reader long after the poem is over. It is clear when reading any poem from “Night Light” that each word was chosen with care, and each poem revised and revised until it was as exact as it could be.

I chose to have the image in a square because, as I mentioned before, the square has four sides and four is a very important number in the design quality of quickness, because it is structured, squared, and can be used to build on top of itself. Also, I thought it was important to include the light being shone out of the train’s headlight because it represents clarity and forsight. To me, the collection “Night Light” is all about comfort, and I figured a train with a bright shining headlight was a way to represent both comfort (in being able to see where you are going, and get there safely) and quickness.

It also features train tracks within the square. I thought was very interesting that something as small and seemingly insignificant as two small squigly lines could be used to give across the message that this is a train company. This reminded me of the concept of “word economy” that I discussed in a previous post on Quick, only in this case it is what I guess one could call “image economy.” The logo is simple, but at the same time it tells a lot about the company, and the strength, security, and structure of its transportation units. I think that makes this logo effective, and those are principles that I definitely want to utilize in my final design for Quick.

Four signifies an effectiveness and structure that is essential to the quality of quickness. Adding or subtracting one from the number four makes it unbalanced and less stable, just as adding or taking out any single word from any of the poems in “Night Light” changes it drastically. Adding, for example, to the poem “American Sketches” could take away from the fleetingness of the poem that is so central to its main idea of looking at a Kansas landscape by train. Taking away from it could lead the reader to feel unsatisfied with the mental picture that was painted.

As explained in the previous post regarding quickness, Calvino described it as straying away from the inclusion of any extra unnecessary baggage in the writing, such as false material, lengthy nonsense, or unjustified digressions. Every word in a piece of writing should be the perfect word: clear, concise, and meaningful.

In my opinion, poetry (or, more specifically, the poetry of Donald Justice) is the epitome of quickness. If a person writes prose, he or she is given free range with regard to how much they write. They can describe one thing in multiple ways and allow one moment to last pages and pages and pages.

A poet, however, has to be conscious of something I like to call “word economy.” What makes poetry different from prose? The easiest answer, of course, is that poetry uses less words. A poet has to think, how can I describe this in the best way? How can I take this extremely profound moment and express it in 20 lines or less? What is the most appropriate single word for this action? What is the best noun? Verb? Adjective? A poet has no room for fillers, and therefore has to be aware of the quickest, most effective way of getting to the point of the poem.

The poems in Donald Justice’s “Night Light” are prime examples of this. His poems have no more words than they absolutley need to have, and each word has been chosen with an immense amount of care and consideration.

This is the emblem that I created for Donald Justice’s “Night Light.” I chose the circle shape because it can represent night and its all-encompassing nature. The one small flame in the middle of the circle represents light.

In nearly every single poem in “Night Light” Justice explores opposites; “Elsewheres” is divided into two sections (South and North), “The Missing Person” describes the contrast between reflections and authentic images, “Girl Sitting Along At Party” describes the contrast between a the lightness of a girl and the immense weight of a darkened room. I feel that my emblem incorporates lightness and darkness in both a concrete and abstract way, and thus visualizes the quality of light in “Night Light.”

The logo for Amnesty International, a non-governmental human rights organization, is very similar to what I had in mind for my design. The circle (or zero, if you will) encompassing the name and logo is very representative of the concept of wholeness and unity that is so integral to the organization’s overall mission.

The candle (shaped like a one) within the circle is symbolic of the need for light and clarity in a world that is so clouded with darkness and controversy (as represented by the barbed wire around the candle). I think that whoever created this logo was very effective in giving enough information about the organization and its mission without giving too much.

I chose to incorporate the numbers zero and one to visualize the quality of lightness in Donald Justice’s “Night Light.” As the title suggests, this collection of poems explores the qualities of night (vastness, darkness, inevitability, etc.) and the qualities of light (brightness, clarity, necessity, etc.). I felt that the number zero represents a starting point, one that is both nothing, as suggested by the night, and everything, as suggested by the light.

I wanted to include the number one in my design too, because as Macnab states, “the symbolic quality of one is wholeness and completion.” The poems in Justice’s book, although different in subject matter, form, and context, come together to form one single collection—”Night Light.” The contrasts between night and light can be represented by the contrasts between the numbers zero and one, as Macnab describes in saying “note that without the contrast of emptiness, “wholeness” has no meaning.” It is my goal to be able to incorporate these four core concepts in my final design: night, light, emptiness, and wholeness.

Calvino explains that first and foremost that lightness in literature is attained by first removing weight: “a lightening of language whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless.” He then explains that lightness can also be brought about in highly abstract description and images that represent the qualities of lightness. Lightness could not exist if it weren’t for its polar opposite: weight. Lightness is special in that it also can be contrasted with darkness. He calls upon Dante to exemplify “heavy” writing: “like some heavy thing in deep water.” He then goes on to state his ultimate goal: “Above all, I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.”

Donald Justice’s “Night Light” connects with Calvino’s Lightness in many ways. It is a collection of poetry, which in itself is representative of lightness. Poems generally are composed of less words than pieces of prose, and therefore the words that are used are chosen with careful attention, and they often carry more weight than the individual words in prose. Justice chose the title “Night Light” because he felt this was a common theme throughout all of the poems in this collection: that of lightness, and its opposites (darkness, weight, etc.). For example, the poem on page 22 entitled “Girl Sitting Alone At Party” contrasts the darkness of the room to the lightness in the girls eyes and ends the poem with the echoing line “I embrace your shadow.” I chose “Night Light” because I felt that in the poems in this collection, Justice utilizes Calvino’s qualities (especially lightness) to enhance the meaning and profoundness of his words.

In this sample, a short poem about religion and philosophy is juxtaposed with natural images of dawn and a grating crackling sound. Many of the earlier images are of landscapes shrouded with thick sheets of fog. As the poem progresses, however, the images become clearer and show the fog lifting off of the landscape. The foggier pictures hide certain parts of the scene and the viewer is left to imagine what the missing parts are. This bringing about of clarity and sparking of imagination are very representative of Calvino’s perspective on the qualities of visibility.

It is a wonderful thing to have a wild imagination and a plethora of images in mind when writing, but eventually the writer must turn on the “windshield wipers” and simplify the story at hand. It is very difficult and dangerous to drive without the wipers on when it is raining. It is also difficult and dangerous to write without reigning in the vast scope of the human mind and imagination. The writer must be able to pick the strongest images, and feel okay with letting go of the ones that do not work as well in favor of the piece, much like the windshield wiper does with the rain–rhythmically, methodically, whenever needed.

The reason I chose a puzzle is this: putting together a puzzle is useless unless you have some sort of idea as to what the final product should look like. When you are in the midst of a puzzle, you must let your mind fill in the spaces that you haven’t found pieces for yet. It is this sort of forward thinking that Calvino is describing when he says, “As soon as the image has become sufficiently clear in my mind, I set about developing it into a story.”

Calvino explains in his fourth memo that visibility in writing could be the cure for this epidemic. He describes two different versions of visibility: with the first, the creative image processing starts with the word and ends with the visual image, and with the second, it starts with the visual image and ends with a word.

Calvino points out that there is a very strong connection between sight and perception, and thus between visibility and imagination. Every person sees the world differently. It is the ultimate goal of visibility to use our imaginations to try to see the world from others points of view and to do the same with the way we compose literature.