Tag Archives: Twentieth-Century Poets

Charles Demuth’s Poster Portraits

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One of the most unique paintings featured on the Modern Art in America stamp sheet is I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, by Charles Demuth. The work is actually a “poster portrait” of Demuth’s friend William Carlos Williams, who is honored on the 2012 Twentieth-Century Poets stamp sheet.

Williams had written a poem, “The Great Figure,” about a fire truck speeding noisily through the streets in the rain with siren blaring, wheels rumbling, and gong clanging. Some lines from that poem (“I saw the figure 5 / in gold / on a red / firetruck”) gave Demuth the title for his painting. Produced in 1928, in oil, graphite, ink, and gold leaf on paperboard, the painting transmits the speed and—some feel—even the noise of the poem by Williams.

Demuth Williams pairWhether or not it makes viewers hear the siren, the painting is a witty homage to Demuth’s friend. The words “Bill” and “Carlos” appear—the latter on a theater marquee in the background—and the poet’s initials are painted at the bottom. In a sly, self-referential joke, the fire engine in Demuth’s painting is speeding past a store window bearing the legend “ART Co.” The work prefigures Pop art and speaks to the way the arts (in this case, painting and poetry) can influence each other.

Between 1923 and 1929, Demuth painted a series of “poster portraits” for which he used symbols, objects, and typography to portray his friends, rather than their physical likeness. In addition to Williams, by then a publishing poet as well as a doctor, Demuth made portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, Arthur Dove, and others.

The were issued March 7, 2013, and are currently available online and in Post Offices around the country. The Twentieth-Century Poets Forever® stamps were issued April 21, 2012, and can be purchased online.

Giveaway: A Poetic Alternative to Traditional Holiday Cards

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Let literary masters help you send your holiday greetings this year. The feature beautiful lines from ten great American poets and evocative illustrations created by artist Vivienne Flesher.

The Twentieth-Century Poets notecard set is available from The Postal Store. Click image for more info.

The set includes ten cards (blank inside, so you can customize), ten envelopes, and ten corresponding Twentieth-Century Poets (Forever®) stamps. The cards are perfect for any occasion and offer something a little unexpected this time of year. Get a set for yourself or for the poetry lover in your life!

The number of books published each year in America has been steadily increasing, and poetry is more popular than ever. The ten great writers honored on the Twentieth-Century Poets (Forever®) stamp sheet, including several who served as United States Poet Laureate, surely deserve part of the credit. They are Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, E. E. Cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. All of them are featured as part of the .

We have two sets of notecards to give away. To enter all you have to do is send your name and address to uspsstamps [at] gmail [dot] com. Winners will be chosen at random. The deadline for entries is midnight EST, Wednesday, December 12. Good luck!

Anatomy of a Stamp: Sylvia Plath

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Today we celebrate writer Sylvia Plath’s 80th birthday. Plath (1932–1963) was honored along with nine other poets on the Twentieth-Century Poets stamp sheet, which was issued earlier this year.

In depicting Plath on the stamp, art director Derry Noyes considered a couple of different options. Early in the stamp development process, Noyes worked with an artist Maira Kalman to create a colorful and lively portrait based on a picture of the artist that the U.S. Postal Service borrowed from the Special Collections library at Smith College, Plath’s alma mater. The art featured the artist’s own handwritten lines from one of Plath’s best-known poems, “Daddy”:

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe

Design direction sometimes changes, however, and USPS ultimately opted to use a black-and-white photograph of Plath, as well as each of her contemporaries featured on the stamps, instead of having the poet’s portrait illustrated. USPS again chose the resources of a rich archival collection, this time working with archivists at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. There they found a picture of Plath by the talented photographer Rollie McKenna.

Twentieth-Century Poets Digital Color Postmark Keepsake

Plath’s life events and her poems are famously intertwined. Readers admire her unvarnished examination of life’s complexities, contradictions, and daily challenges, and the ways in which she expressed her own highs and lows in a raw and direct style. In the photograph, Plath sits on a sofa or chair and regards the camera’s presence obliquely, perhaps lost in thought and contemplating new verse.

McKenna’s picture of Plath was taken in 1959. Four years later, less than six months after her thirty-first birthday, Plath ended her life. McKenna’s photograph, among the many others that captured Plath’s intelligence and youthful beauty, is—like Plath’s small but potent body of writing—a touchstone for her legions of devotees.

Happy Birthday to Poet Denise Levertov

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Happy birthday, Denise Levertov! One of ten poets featured on the Twentieth-Century Poets stamp sheet issued earlier this year, the award-winning Levertov was born on this day in 1923.

Levertov drew her poetry from her own experiences, and she encouraged her readers to open themselves up fully to the world, to find answers to universal questions by looking inward. As she explains in “Pleasures”:

I like to find
what’s not found
at once, but lies

within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.

In her poems, public and private form a single universe in which fairy tales and myths mingle with the objects and events of everyday life.

Have a favorite poem by Levertov? Join the birthday celebration and share it with us in the comments.

“Denise Levertov”, 1953
Photograph by Rollie McKenna
@ Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation
Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Foundation

Poet Wallace Stevens & The Power of Imagination

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Poet Wallace Stevens was born on this day in 1879. An elegant and playful writer, Stevens—who had a long and very successful career in the insurance business—created poems that richly reward patient reading.

Some of his poems are highly comic, while others are somber and spare. Many of them explore the relationship between consciousness and reality. Take, for example, “The Snow Man,” an excerpt from which appears on the Twentieth-Century Poets stamp sheet. The poem begins:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

In order to understand winter, we must shed our human perceptions and expectations and become like the snow man, for whom the winter world is not cold and desolate. It just is. Human consciousness, Wallace seems to be saying, shapes our reality; to find truth, we must transcend ourselves.

Of course, this is just an interpretation of the poet’s message. Artist Vivienne Flesher (who illustrated the ) chose to represent the poem not literally with the image of a snow man but with what a snow man might see: a single pine tree glowing in the cool winter light.

Isn’t it gorgeous?

This image appears on one of the cards in the , which includes 10 unique note cards and envelopes plus 10 stamps. Each of the cards features a painting by Flesher that, in one way or another, re-imagines the sentiments of the poem it illustrates, rendering the words of the poems both familiar and strange.

Stevens may have appreciated this. Poetry, he once said, is a “a way through reality.” In the words of one critic, “The imagination is the true hero of a Stevens poem.”