I Promise You, A Chapbook

I Promise You

I Promise You

I Promise You

I Promise You

Copyright © by Mads Klump

ARTD 444 Typographic Systems, Spring 2024

Molly C. Briggs, Instructor

School of Art & Design

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

John Lee Clark is an American deafblind poet, essayist, historian, and translator and an activist in the Protactile movement. His acclaimed How to Communicate: Poems, 2023, incorporates creative reflections on the Braille slate, prose poems, and “erasures” that reinterpret nineteenth-century poems and critique the limits of the canon.

I Promise You is an original re-setting of Clark’s poem “I Promise You.”

This project was inspired by the pedagogical research of book designer and doctoral student Natalie F. Smith, with whom Professor Briggs has co-taught typography in past semesters.

to the faces who I am also a face to

Foreword

How to Communicate pushes past and erases what we may see as the normal standards of our abilities of sight and hearing, inviting us to alter our perspective to that of touch and texture, to see with our hands and feel with our hearts. John Lee Clark is a protactile poet, essayist, teacher, husband, and father that touches his words into our reality. He brings us to a cacophony of emotions, reshaping what we understand of communication and language.

This book is an inspiration of Clark’s poem, I Promise You. It represents the physical tenderness and love that one holds and recognizing our loved ones in different ways and the expression of love that morphs and changes with us. I hope to be able to express that tenderness in this project, to honor Clark’s fond words with something visionary so he may continue to touch us with his words.

I Promise You

there’s nothing in my face. There is nothing in yours.

What we have are called heads. They are nothing unless we kiss.

Lips are wonderful. They are full of mechanoreceptors.

In the Old World we all used to kiss

and kiss.

It was then that we did have faces.

We had noses and cheeks and foreheads and soft downy hair.

In the New World we stopped kissing.

Those who were already here stopped.

Those who came stopped.

Now there are only four people who have heads that are also faces.

They are an artist and three children

for whom I have a face other than my hands.

Poem by John Lee Clark

Designed and produced by Mads Klump

Type set with Providence Sans Pro & Maiola

Providence Sans Pro is designed by Guy Jeffrey Nelson with the FontFont Foundry

Maiola is designed by Veronika Burian with the TypeTogether Foundry

POEM SELECTED & DESIGNED