A few years ago, I had a phone conversation with a friend who had recently moved to Australia. He recounted a harrowing tale of learning to drive on the other side. While on the phone, I made a little drawing about his experience, embellished with imagined screams, that read Careful / Carful / Awful / Earful. I was vaguely aware there was a four-line poetic form called a quatrain, and that this might be one, but didn’t give it much thought. Mostly I was reminded of the rhythms of the sing-song school yard rhymes I’d often heard my grandmother recite from her Italian childhood.
A day or two later, I noticed an online ad for Cartier. Luxury brands aren’t really my thing, but on this particular day I was struck by Cartier’s elegant logo, with its lyrical curves and delicate lines. I continued scrolling, but moments later was stopped dead by an ad for the air conditioning company Carrier, with its decidedly inelegant logo, a cheap imitation of Cartier’s refinement. Cartier, Carrier; Cartier, Carrier—swapping a t for an r, the two didn’t really rhyme, but they had some deep connection I couldn’t quite fathom. They got stuck in my head for weeks.
In my work as a painter, I’d often wanted to make text paintings, but they always posed two problems I found difficult—what to say and how to say it. Like John Cage, I don’t really have much to say; but even if I did, the idea of choosing a typeface and designing a visual language around text seemed daunting. I’m just not particularly interested in those kinds of decisions—instead, I mostly work with found imagery and preexisting visual systems.
Over the next week, these threads came together and I realized I could combine the sing-song rhymes of my grandmother’s childhood, with the visual vocabulary of corporate identity; and that combining the geometry of poetry, rhyme and meter, with readymade logos gave me something to say and a way to say it.
The first poem I wrote was Dairy Queen / Lean Cuisine / Ovaltine / Jimmy Dean. I did it as a joke for myself, which I composed in Photoshop by downloading and arranging the necessary logos, and then carefully painting each with gouache on watercolor paper. It looked alright, but I knew it wasn’t very good. Because every line rhymed and was three syllables, it was too flat, too dead. By now I knew this was a quatrain and had learned that a quatrain can rhyme in fifteen different ways; so I started reading about which poets favored which rhyme schemes, and how they used meter to bring poems to life.
I began to pour over Wikipedia lists of magazine titles, movies, television shows, brand names — anything and everything I could find that combined a recognizable name with a recognizable type. Over months, I compiled the most recognizable names into a spreadsheet and started sorting them. Eventually I compiled a rhyming dictionary of almost 2,000 brand names sorted by the number of syllables and the sound of the final syllable. Cartier went with Frito Lay and Ocean Spray, but also with Subway and Yoplait—which were color coded to reflect the syllable count.
As I compiled my spreadsheet, I kept trying to put poems together, but they never quite worked. Until I finally hit the right note with a poem that read TikTok / 30 Rock / Shake Shack / Cadillac. Not only did the logos look right together, but the rhyme and meter worked too. More importantly, it seemed to describe someone’s day – the way we consume food and media and move through our lives. Someone, right now, today was living this poem.
After that, it got easier. I learned what worked and what didn’t. Sometimes I could put together a poem in an afternoon, others I’d rework for weeks. Is the old Subway logo better than the new Subway logo? How do I negotiate a name that sounds better, but looks worse; and vice versa? Is Coca-Cola too iconic to use? Is C&H too obscure? Each poem I completed, I carefully painted with gouache on watercolor paper—these were paintings after all.
I decided I would make at least one poem for each of the possible rhyme schemes, in the same way an artist like Sol Lewitt would execute every permutation of a visual system. Some seemed unlikely to produce the sing-song quality I liked, but no matter—if AAAB could only produce a flat-footed poem, I’d lean in to flat-footedness.
I stared at my spreadsheet for days, weeks—looking for patterns, looking for connections, looking for the best logos. One day I happened to sort all the single syllable brands and noticed there were four pronouns in the list, surely this was a poem. The poem didn’t rhyme, but I always liked the challenge of finding inevitability without the crutch of rhyme. It was bloody and scary, We and Us pink and friendly, her was strong and elegant, but somehow lower case. Each of these logos are reflections of values we hold as a society. By digging through the mass of information contained in them, and noticing patterns, it was possible to uncover the values we take for granted and ignore.
Some rhyme schemes were easier than others, ABCB and ABCC produced lots of poems. Others were nearly impossible, ABBA gave me fits. But as I completed poems for the final rhyme schemes, rhyming pairs and trios became harder to find. I’d used many of the logos I most wanted to paint, was determined not to use any twice, and a vast majority of those that remained were either red, black, or ugly. It turns out that most logos are red or black; fashion brands are always black, fast food chains usually red—but for me, rhyming color was just as important as rhyming words. And so, I’ve moved on to making other kinds of jokes for myself.
I don’t know much about poetry, but it turns out I like words. And I like making careful decisions about words. These poems were a chance to think about words, to think about sounds, to think about color and design, and to find humor and even occasional beauty in the ridiculous ways we live our lives. When life gives you late capitalism, make lemonade.
