Wondering the Alphabet

Like every alphabet, the origin of ours is vast and complex. It has grown from a determination of grunts and yelps of joyous wonder, through hollow reed pens pressed onto delicate papyrus, rubbed in ink across wood block carvings, shuffled around moveable type, all the way up to how our current hand-held devices and their design applications deliver us a constant barrage of typefaces, fonts and spatial designs. This book was written with that in mind as well as from a perspective of those writers, readers and designers who have spent their whole lives, in one way or another, focused on all the alphabet provides. Not only is there a chronology of our alphabet tracing graphically its changes over time, but this text also includes and combines tanka poems by twenty-six credited poets, each facing a visually translated composition of their work graphically rendered in full color by Roderick Martinez. In addition to these texts and graphics, every poet included has written his or her subjective thoughts about a specific letter assigned to them totally by chance. The beauty of these visual translations face to face with each poem, creates a most unique and heretofore unseen correspondence between both art forms. Each enhances the other, becomes a part of the other, allows for all ends to open up and flow between the two. Possibilities become infinite and Martinez s vision along with these twenty-six gracious poets, is both a sight to see and read!

Roderick Martinez has a MFA in graphic design from the Rochester Institute of Technology where he studied under R. Roger Remington. He has worked as a corporate graphic designer and creative director/designer for agencies in New York, before starting his own visual communications firm in 1998. His designs have won regional, national, and international awards. He has taught graphic design, advertising design, and psychology of advertising at Cazenovia College and is the current program coordinator and tenured associate professor of communications design at Syracuse University. He has served as faculty advisor of the Syracuse University AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) student chapter. He has lectured on a range of design topics both regionally and nationally. Martinez has been awarded several Chancellor's Awards for Public Engagement and Scholarship. These awards recognize that his classes exemplify the highest ideal of sustained, quality engagement at Syracuse University. Roderick is a wonderer.