Poster Image
$20
Item#: 2010SYR03
Purchase Details
11x17-inches, printed on heavy weight (100-pound) Hammermill cover paper. We package each print with a piece of chipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.
You also receive…
An information page with photos of the artist and poet, and hand-written comments from each.
Medium- and large-format posters are available by custom order. Contact us for details.
Black Coffee Only
poster information
Description
Black coffee only
Cappuccino and latté
just hold up the line
My haiku started out as a simple piece of satire—a comment about people's tendency to make things more complicated than need be and slowing me down in the process.
In some ways I share their guilt. I strive for simplicity, but seldom achieve it. That's also the irony of the poem. The haiku form seems simple, but the act of achieving meaning can be complicated. Thus, my addiction to the craft of writing becomes the steamed drink that keeps me from the black coffee of simplicity.
From the poem, I knew I wanted to incorporate people standing in line. So I went to Starbucks and took pictures. But I didn't get very good pictures. So I ended up going through photos I had already taken, and compiled them, so it would look like the people were standing in line. Most of them are people I know: family members, friends, and me. I'm the one behind the guy up front, to the right of him.
I like the poster because it's different from what I normally do. I don't normally do pictures with a million people in them. And it was fun, because the people weren't random people, but from pictures I took years ago. So it's fun to look at it and remember where the pictures were taken.