Richard Blanco’s How to Love a Country is poetic, poignant, and patriotic. Whether writing about his own history as an immigrant, his own gender identity as gay, his own grief on gun violence, Blanco’s poems are all about America as a work in progress. After reading this collection, I could see why Obama selected Blanco as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet.

I wanted to write a poem about delay
The white space between word and music
One night in Ohio a decade ago
Under a thunderstorm’s bad blank verse

As I counted aloud between lightning and clap
A friend tackled me to the ground
To shut me up so he could hear it, the faint
Percussion I could just call thunder

If I wanted to be clear
I’ve tried to write this poem for years
But can’t and won’t, as every line
Falls faster than I can chase it, acid raindrop

Seeping into clover, garbage lyrics
Rising through its stem, poetry almost
As toxic as the city
Spraying my neighborhood down

A pesticide to x the little messengers
So megafauna can continue
Planting real estate
Some sad poet named this chemical Duet

The friend who tackled me got sick
I visited as he received a drip of what I called
Quicksilver in an early draft, but it was just
Poison, I mean chemo, which saved his life

Duet on the apple blossom, duet in the core
Nights drift by to be surveilled
For words, as thunder splits the poem again
Half of it standing up and counting

Half of it tackled into clover
Pollen painted with our syntax
Pulses once then meets a cell
The rain is light years away

Daniel Poppick

In addition to changing the wordmark, I made the switch from em to rem unit for my typographic control after a Slack discussion with my former colleagues at Vassar. I used em for scalability and inheritance, but em could cause compounding sizing. Using rem seems to avoid the headache; therefore, I might as well making the switch.

After reading Robin Rendle’s note, I added this new CSS element on all my headings:

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
  text-wrap: balance;
}

I am not seeing the effect yet, but I hope it will just work in the future once browsers support it. It’s not a big deal. I still like to tinker around this site as often as I could.

I am in the middle of listening to John Gruber talking with Jason Kottke about web design, Movable Type, and web development. I have tremendous respect for them on how they could turn their blogs into full-time jobs. I am not sure about Jason, but John is doing pretty darn well with the sponsorships on both his site and podcast. I don’t subscribe to their RSS feeds. I just check their homepages every once in a while. I can’t keep up with John’s podcast either. I only check in once in while for something special, like the latest episode about Kottke.org turns 25. That is quite a milestone. Congrats, Jason.

Vài tháng gần đây có sự thay đổi trong công việc khiến tôi căng thẳng, thậm chí chán nản. Tôi tự khuyên mình đừng lo xa quá chuyện gì đến sẽ đến. Những gì ngoài tầm tay mình thì cũng không thay đổi được gì. Nhưng làm sao không lo ngại khi tôi còn có trách nhiệm nuôi sống gia đình.

Đôi lúc cũng tâm sự với bà xã về một số vấn đề tôi đang đối diện nhưng rồi lại ngại khiến thêm một người phải lo âu. Người ngoài cuộc cũng không giúp đỡ được gì. Thôi thì cứ tiếp tục đến đâu hay đến đó. Khi một cánh cửa này đóng lại sẽ có cánh cửa khác mở ra. Hy vọng là vậy.

Tuần vừa rồi trước khi bước vào cuộc họp, tôi vẫn bâng khuâng không biết chuyện gì sẽ xảy ra. Tôi cũng đã chuẩn bị tinh thần và tự nhắc nhủ mình rằng dù chuyện gì xảy ra cũng phải giữ bình tĩnh. Đừng để cảm xúc của chính mình làm mình mất đi lý lẽ. Đã có một số chuyện không tốt đẹp xảy ra khi tôi không tự kiềm chế được cảm xúc của chính mình. Tôi không muốn điều đó lại tái diễn.

Bỗng nhiên tôi nghĩ ngay đến mẹ. Tôi xin mẹ giúp đỡ cho tôi nhưng tôi không biết yêu cầu mẹ giúp đỡ điều gì. Thế rồi cuộc họp diễn ra và kết quả êm đềm hơn những gì tôi tưởng tượng. Mọi chuyện coi như cũng tạm ổn. Tôi cảm thấy thoải mái hơn một chút cho dù tương lai không thể biết được. Một lần nữa, phép bí ẩn của mẹ đã giúp tôi vượt qua một khó khăn trong cuộc sống. Cám ơn mẹ nhiều.

The head of the fish thuds
into the kitchen sink

with a splash of lettuced water.
She says, Not this. Don’t

marry the head or anyone
too cunning. She saws the knife

through the tail. The muscle
springs. Not a man

who doesn’t have a brain.
There’s no meat there.

As I walk through fish markets
lined with skinned goats,

their heads on the tables,
the finned bellies glisten under

the dusty sun, jutting
proudly blue and silver.

My mother’s voice asks me
if I understand, if I’ll resist

the smooth talk from the fish’s
mouth, his fanned tail swaying,

gifting a breeze on the back
of my neck. I prod the slick,

elastic skin, pierce him with two
fingers, and eat around the bones.

Su Cho

This blog is having an identity crisis. I changed the wordmark once again.

I am still using DJR’s Megazoid, but I am not doing any customization. I am playing around with the shade. I am taking it back to the old school. Since I made the logo filling up the browser, I had to remove the big hero typography at the top. I brought it to thee bottom instead. Now I have both big top and bottom.

It’s nice to have a personal blog I can play with the design. I don’t have to take the branding too seriously. I am digging this direction for now, but I can change it tomorrow, next month, or next year. We’ll see how it goes.

Yesterday was the last day of the season at Roundtop. With rain and warm temperatures, Roundtop held on as long as it could. The trails were brown and slushy, but they were still skiable. I was snowboarding fine. I was disappointed with Mother Nature more than the resorts.

It doesn’t seem like we will get any snow this year. On top of that, the temperatures had risen as high as 70 degrees (Fahrenheit). The artificial snow was melting fast. Despite the terrible conditions, I managed to make the most out of my Epic pass this year. I hit the trails as many times as I could. I set out to learn snowboarding and I achieved my goal.

Learning to snowboard was a steep challenge for skiers who wanted to make the transition. I fell so many times and my feet were so uncomfortable, but I stuck with it. I progressed from the bunny slope to the double black diamond terrain in one season.

In retrospect, I tried to advance too quickly. I didn’t spend enough time on the green trails to get better with my turns. I started to learn quick turns so I could go down the double black. I pivoted my back foot to control my speed and it became a habit I needed to break on my heel side. Even on mellow terrains, I kept kicking my foot forward to slow myself down before I could make my toe turns. I had done as much as I could and I had progressed to where I wanted to be, but I wish I could spend more time on the trials to learn to ride better.

My focus for this season has been on snowboarding. I skied less and didn’t pick up any new skills. I still wanted to learn carving on skis, but couldn’t get to it. I encouraged Đạo and Xuân to learn carving as well, but I was not on my skis to work with them. As a result, they skied with the skills they already have and not picking up any new techniques. I am fine with them enjoying themselves, but they seemed to get a bit bored. Once they could reach the double black diamond slope, they had nowhere else to go. If they don’t learn new skills, they just ski down hill again and again.

I encouraged Xuân to learn snowboarding together with me, but he stayed with skiing so he could go fast with his brothers and cousins. He ended up not getting past the point where he stopped falling. Snowboarding is no longer a passion for Đán. He is already bored with it. He is good and no longer feeling the challenge. He didn’t bother learning anything new.

Will this be the last seasonal Epic pass for us? If the boys are no longer interested in skiing or snowboarding, I don’t want to waste almost $3,000 for all of us. It is only worthwhile if they wanted to go on their own instead of his mother forcing him to go. Skiing and snowboarding are great exercises for the winter and they are so lucky that we are offering the opportunity for them.

One of the benefits of skiing and snowboarding was that we didn’t catch any winter sickness. Our body got used to the cold before we could get a cold. If we were sitting around the house all day on our digital devices, I am sure we would have caught all kinds of winter sickness. Furthermore, I hadn’t had a gout attack despite my increase in drinking alcohol and consuming beef. I think because I put my feet to work all the time.

I wanted to hit the slopes every opportunity I got. My wife was not too happy with my obsession. Since we paid so much for the Epic passes, I might as well take advantage of them. I hope we can make one more trip to Vermont in the first week of April when the kids have their spring break. We also need to decide as a family if we should get Epic passes for next year. I hope we do, but we should make it our priority over other hobbies during the winter.

for my grandma, whose Korean name I still can’t remember

Even a ghost that eats and dies again will have better color.

How hungry we must have been to die in the ocean just to pull at its weeds, dry them, soak the leaves in sesame oil.

Bleed our hands for not even a tongueful of meat from an ungiving shell.

A bird that cries at night cries because it mourns a lover.

A bird that cries in the morning cries because it is hungry.

How do you eat like a king?

Hang the remains of last week’s fish so it sways above the table.

Have a bite of rice. Chew ten times. Look at the fish. Chew ten times. Repeat.

Give thanks for anything you can put in your mouth.

Su Cho

Rae Armantrout is a master of minimalist. Her poems are concise and economical. She wastes no word and she leaves plenty of whitespace on the page. I read the Finalist collection twice and enjoyed the pieces each time. My personal favorites are “The Test” and “Late Remark.”

BB writes:

Hey Donny!

I am a senior Industrial Design student at BYU, I work as a UX/UI designer, and I also happen to enjoy bookbinding. I speak Vietnamese and have a strong interest in Vietnamese literature and design, and Vietnamese Typography Vol. 2 has been a wonderful resource. I love the examples, and am especially fond of the idiomatic expressions compilation.

I am reaching out to you because I am interested in making Vietnamese Typography into a physical book. I would absolutely love to be able to make your wonderful digital resource into a physical artifact to add to my personal collection. To this end, I am contacting you with a proposition I hope you might be able to help me with. I would like your help in formatting Vietnamese Typography for print—page cutoffs, chapter headers, cover design, etc.—and in return I will design and make the binding and construct the book by hand. If you’re interested in this proposition, I will make two copies of the physical book: one for you, and one for myself. I am eager to collaborate with you on this project, and I hope to hear back from you soon.

Thank you,

BB

I replied:

Hi B,

Thank you for your interest in turning my web book into a physical book. As long as you make it for yourself and not selling it, I am fine with that. The major issue you would run into is licensing. The majority of the typefaces I use on Vietnamesetypography.com were contributed by type designers. Most of them only provided web font files. I don’t have the desktop files and the licenses.

I have over 28 type families on the site. None of them are open source; therefore, it would be pretty expensive to license all the type families for desktop. This was the reason I decided to drop the print copy for the second edition of the book.

Furthermore, I am continuing to add more typeface recommendations and create more samples; therefore, the print version will be behind whenever I make updates.

I am not sure what you have in mind, but it is not as simple as turning a web book into a physical book.

Regards,

Donny Trương