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Your eyes and ears for the 2006 festival

The Bishop Wars: Choose a Side With Style!

Filed under: X-Rea: Irvin Type Watch Tagged: Alice Quinn, books, Elizabeth Bishop, poetry, Rea Irvin, typography

Since the dust is still swirling from the showdown at highbrow noon between The New Yorker's Alice Quinn and Helen Vendler, Princess Stanza of Stanz, over Quinn's collection of the late Elizabeth Bishop's previously unpublished poems, I say it's time to ditch our passé Team Lachey buttons and wear something we can believe in. I present these hastily but lovingly constructed ribbons. Note that our friends at The Sign Generator provide the Irvin typeface as a design option! It was tough to choose a good face for Vendler that didn't seem editorial on my part ("Karloff," "Braille," "Ransom," etc.—I've decided I won't judge the poems till I've read them all; anyway, the people quoted on both sides of the Times story made me feel much friendlier toward the idea of going all Sappho-fragment on E.B.), but I settled on Juliet and Chalkboard. The purple is the closest thing they had to crimson.

Print 'em, cut 'em out, stick a pin through 'em, and affix according to your allegiances. If you believe everything you read in the Times, you may fear that the pin will end up in a wrong place indeed if you go around wearing the wrong ribbon when either Vendler or Quinn is in the Poets House, but that's a risk you—the courageous scribbler as unafraid of retribution as you are of consumption, though both are inevitable in some form—will take. If your poetasterous rival should find him- or herself wearing a certain ribbon on his or her back unawares at the National Arts Club some night, however, that will be on your conscience forever. Be not afraid! You may have an Alice Quinn in your future, as Vendler warns, but that might be pretty cool. Either way, you can have a proud ribbon pinned on your chest in the present.

Cut out and display proudly, but beware...

1 comments

Comments

Played with the ribbon maker and wanted to mention a simiar sign generators site on www.customsigngenerator.com...

WHAK'dApril 30, 2006

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Emdashes, founded December 2004 BY Emily Gordon, is a place where keen and dedicated readers of The New Yorker, past and present, can find related news and commentary: about people, subjects, and ideas within the magazine, and events and conversations outside its pages. Learn more about us and our contributors.

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