Last year, when I learned how to use a laser cutter to make my pop-up book Fall, I wanted to see what else the cutter was good for and settled on cutting out wooden pendants in the shape of symbols or letters. Instead of a-z, I decided on ampersands and interrobangs. I looked at other punctuation and symbols too, including the pilcrow, after reading this post on the typographers Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ blog. (A pilcrow is the editor’s paragraph mark — it’s not really a backwards P, according to Hoefler “in its original form, the mark was an open C crossed by a vertical line or two, a scribal abbreviation for capitulum, the Latin word for ‘chapter.’ “) I cut out a few different pilcrows in several font faces and gave up, either unhappy with the way they looked (too much like a backward P) or the legs were so thin they snapped off…
This morning I ran across one of those wooden pilcrow experiments in a dish I keep on my desk of odd pins and coins, and that led me back to reading Hoefler’s post again. And just as entertaining is his post on ampersands.

This Thursday, April 30, is Poem in Your Pocket Day, part of the celebration of National Poetry Month. The idea is that you carry a poem with you to share with people you meet that day. Their website has a downloadable pocket-sized poems that you can print to share or poems categorized by topic that you can choose from.
In the last issue of Ampersand, Cathy Miranker wrote about Poem in Your Pocket day. We included a cardboard library pocket with the issue along with instructions for a simple single sheet book. Cathy proposed that people make a book, using a favorite poem as content, and bring it to the annual PCBA Printers’ and Book Arts Fair on Sat May 9th, for our own local celebration of poetry month. I’m excited to see what people come up with.

Bear with the first 30 seconds — it’s just still credits… Part of an exhibit of Experimental Typography From the Seattle Central Creative Academy Graphic Design Students.

Another topic that seems to come up a lot around me recently is Twitter, specifically is it good for anything. I first checked it out last year when there was a wild fire near my sister’s house in Los Angeles — someone was posting updates about the fire, but calling my sister turned out to be much more informative (and accurate). Then this week there was a article in the NY Times about a woman who tweets mini-recipes. For instance:

Biscotti: mix 1/3c sug/3T oil/egg/t anise flavr; +c flour/t bkgpwdr. Roll log to fit bkgpan; pat down. 30m@375/190C. Slice~14; brwn+6m/side.

Quite a feat of condensed writing and getting the bare essentials into 140 characters. (You can see more here.)
The article says “entries on her personal Twitter stream are all written as senryu, a syllabically constrained poetic form like haiku. Here’s one: ‘As a Catholic schooled atheist, I’m sorry for an awful naught.’”
I didn’t know about senryu, and here’s what Columbia Encyclopedia says:

senryu (sĕnrēū’) , a Japanese poem structurally similar to the haiku but primarily concerned with human nature. It is usually humorous or satiric. Used loosely, the term means a poem similar to the haiku that does not meet the criteria for haiku.

and wikipedia says “Unlike haiku, senryū do not include a kireji (cutting word), and do not generally include a kigo, or season word.” Now I’m not sure what I write — since I like the cutting word part but usually don’t have a season or nature word in mine.
There’s a twitter stream of only haiku — here’s the first example I saw (which is probably really a senryu):

Bad 401k.
Hidden fees eat it away.
Zombie savings plan.

and a senryu stream. And finally haiku headlines, which condenses the news into 3 line snippets — probably the perfect way to keep up with the world for those of us who think we’re too busy…