Local Writer Volunteers His Talent and Advertising Experience To Help Boost Bernie Sanders

Local Writer Volunteers His Talent and Advertising Experience To Help Boost Bernie Sanders

    By Paul Steven Stone

( Click on to enlarge)

If you follow what’s happening on the internet, you will witness the Democratic Party’s political battle for the American presidency being fought fast and furiously in the trenches. Featuring home-made videos, media story hyperlinks and highly creative memes hyping or haranguing the candidates, this battle allows the followers of both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to personally engage in the battle for the hearts and minds of the voting public.

As a politically astute writer with progressive leanings, I was surprisingly unaware of Bernie Sanders for the first half year of his campaign. But then as I listened and watched him move across the country espousing the very same beliefs and observations I had developed over the last 30 years—especially after the protests of the Occupy Movement—I began to, yes!, ‘Feel The Bern.’ And next I knew I was stepping wholly into the fray, creating an entire ad campaign with the aid of a partner who would design the ads. Together we help people start to realize (mirroring my own experience) just who Bernie Sanders is, and what he stands for.

  Our first ad in our “CHANNELING BERNIE” ad campaign, a series of 36 ads so far, created to elevate the underwhelming online communications I had seen coming out of Bernie’s camp. It was an effort wholly epic in the great American tradition. Two advertising veterans creating an online campaign for Bernie Sanders' seemingly quixotic reach for the presidency.

It's been an amazing journey, creating these ads, one in which I've honestly felt like I've been channeling the candidate's vision and perspective. Of course, there’s always the possibility he's been in my head over the years and I just didn't know it. Check out the campaign at http://www.paulstonesthrow.com/channeling-bernie-the-complete-series/ and decide for yourself. 

A short word about the unusual format of the ads themselves. I recently saw an ad from an advertising award show that gave me the idea to have my headlines serve as the start and finish to the ad's entire text, creating a sandwich effect, so to speak. It just meant I would create each ad’s headline in two pieces, an interesting effect by itself, no matter what the message might be.

I'm not sure why, but the ads proved to be highly compelling and more readable than the usual run of political online or print ads.

As to why, it could be I’ve excited the reader's natural curiosity about how I, the ad-maker, forced the start and the finish of the copy to fit within the narrative flow. Or there might be some momentum-building effect by having the beginning of an ad suddenly leap to the ad's conclusion? Either way, the ads are uniquely readable in this format.

And so, with art direction by Bill Dahlgren, concept and copy by Paul Steven Stone, I offer for your inspection, enjoyment and further distribution the 36—Count 'Em!— 36 ads that make up the Primary Phase of our "Channeling Bernie" advertising campaign.

Whether Bernie wins or loses his campaign, I will certainly feel I did my best!

Again, you can find the campaign at: http://www.paulstonesthrow.com/channeling-bernie-the-complete-series/



Cambridge-based Paul Steven Stone is a long time veteran of Boston advertising and other writing ventures. His best-known work is the branding and multi-faceted advertising campaign he created for W.B. Mason. Novelist, humorist, political commentator, bloggist, Stone has been writing for over half a century. To see more of Stone’s work and biography, go to PaulStevenStone.com. You can find his blog at PaulStonesThrow.com.

Tess Gallagher to read at the Hastings Room Reading Series April 18, 2016

TESS GALLAGHER reads

with LARRY MATSUDA

from their collaborative book of poems

Boogie-Woogie Crisscross presented by

Marc Vincenz, editor of MadHat Press and Plume Editions

with the Hastings Room Reading Series

                                       

Monday April 18, 7:00–9:00 pm

The Friends Meeting House

5 Longfellow Park

(opposite the Longfellow House)

Cambridge, MA 02138

Tess Gallagher’s latest book is Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf, 2011). She recently

companioned the film BIRDMAN, which includes her late husband Raymond Carver’s story: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” She lives and writes in Port Angeles, Washington, her birthplace, as well as intervals spent in her cottage in the west of Ireland, where all of the poems included here were written in

her chair that overlooks a green field in County Sligo.

Lawrence Matsuda was born in the Minidoka, Idaho, World War II Relocation Center, one of the concentration camps where approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were held without due process. Matsuda has a Ph.D. in education and was a visiting professor at Seattle University.

In 2015 he completed two graphic novels with artist Matt Sasaki and interviews with Japanese American

fighters from the 442nd and their relatives, An American Hero: Shiro Kashino, and Fighting for America: Nisei Soldiers.

Boogie-Woogie Crisscross, an intercontinental collaboration/exchange between two poets of international stature is rowdy, rambunctious and heartfelt. With a combination of joyful shared experiences and attention to human suffering, past and present, its authors bring a thoughtful and poetic focus to bear upon global events and their own histories.

These poems developed via e-mails exchanged between Tess Gallagher and Lawrence Matsuda over a number of years. The resulting collaboration is a poetry jam session where they trade and borrow images, and run riffs on each other’s poems in a responsive, competitive, and lighthearted way. Early on, Tess characterizes the style as being “kind of hip and comic book and jangly.” Like any dance it’s also an invitation to lose time and as Larry says—to show your “chops.” A kind of dueling banjos.

It is impossible to read Tess Gallagher’s poems without being drawn into their mesmerizing rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced images. —Joyce Carol Oates

Remembering The Grolier Poetry Book Shop before 2006

( Left to Right: Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti with the late owner of the Grolier Gordon Carinie)

Remembering The Grolier before 2006

by Richard Dey

The sign “No Law books, No Text Books” was taped to the door, the long couch to the left of the door and beneath the big window stretched invitingly, and above the shelves of books, out of reach and not easy to see, hung the framed black-and-white photographs of poets you found in anthologies of twentieth century poetry. Proprietor Gordon Carinie, by then an old man, was in the shop, standing around. I first went up the two or three high, unlevel steps and into the shop in the fall of 1970 and continued to buy books there for some 35 years. It was the shop everyone at The Harvard Advocate went to, and I was on the Advocate board, eventually as poetry editor.

While Cairnie seemed aloof, Louisa Solano, who took over the shop in 1974, was always friendly and helpful even as she was always busy running the business. Her loyal dog lay somewhere close by, a kind of medic in case she who had epilepsy had a seizure. Louisa replaced the couch with a table for book and magazine displays. You could do nothing but stand and circle slowly the big middle table, and open and sample and close more books and chapbooks of poetry than you could imagine. There was hardly room to turn between the table and the wall shelves, and pull a book down from a shelf. The little bookshop, crammed as a mussel bed, was in its pleasant, redolent way overwhelming.

Louisa carried and sold my first chapbook, Bequia Poems, in 1979. She did the same with my first book, The Bequia Poems, in 1988. At that time, I was publishing what could be called “boat poems” in various journals and magazines including SAIL. In the April 1987 issue, as a main illustrated feature, appeared a dramatic narrative of mine, “The Loss of the Schooner Kestrel.” I gave a copy to Louisa and she passed it on the Andreas Tauber, then the artistic director of The Poets’ Theater. A month later, on May 8, in the Cambridge home of Molly Adams, he produced a staged reading of the poem. 

Just as Louisa was more than a bookseller, the Grolier was more than a bookshop. I went to book signings there, and to readings it sponsored in the common room of nearby Adams House. In my collection of chapbooks is Nightfire by Gail Mazur who on the title page inscribed “To Richard Dey at the Grolier 9/16/87” and signed it. Louisa herself gave creditable introductions to the poets reading. The big store window in those days before the Internet was, with its posters and announcements, a main source of information for upcoming readings in the greater Cambridge area.

Richard Dey

I graduated from  Harvard College in 1973 and after a year living near Porter Square moved out of Cambridge. For years I returned to go to readings and the Out of Town newsstand, and to buy supplies at Bob Slate’s Stationary, and various things at The Coop. For sentimental reasons I continued to eat at the Wursthaus or get a turkey sandwich at Elsie’s for as long as those places lasted. On these forays into Cambridge I parked on or near Plympton Street. While I may have stopped in at the Star Book Store in search of used treasure, it was the Grolier that I passed by first and last on my errands, and often enough went into to buy something that I really couldn’t afford—but could not afford not to have. And Louisa, ready in the rear corner at the cash register, was of course glad to look up and smile and ring up the sale.

*********************************************************************************


Dey graduated from Tabor Academy and, after two years at St. Lawrence University and three in the U.S. Army, from Harvard College in 1973. He has worked as a commercial fisherman in the offshore lobster and swordfish fisheries off New England. As freelance journalist, he has contributed to Yachting, Sail, Offshore, The Boston Globe, and Harvard Magazine, among other publications. Currently, he is an instructor of maritime history and literature in the SEAmester program of Southhampton College, Long Island University. The father of two boys, he lives on the south shore of Massachusetts and visits Bequia in the West Indies frequently.

The Sunday Poet: Llyn Clague

Llyn Clague

Llyn Clague is a poet based in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.  His poems have been published widely, including in Ibbetson Street, Atlanta Review, Wisconsin Review, California Quarterly, Main Street Rag, New York Quarterly, and other magazines.  His seventh book, Hard-Edged and Childlike, was published by Main Street Rag in September, 2014.  Visit www.llynclague.com

The Lined Pad

Stung again,

I sit with ancient envy

and a pad,

a pad lined like a keyboard,

the cold black-and-white instrument

my always older sister, as a child,

used so brilliantly to grab love –

a pad, whose slat-like rows,

blank with potential, stretch to the far edge,

and, from last night,

a memory that evokes, instead of envy

and its darker sisters fear and greed,

light –

a memory, after we both,

in our old age, confessed to depression,

blank with possibles and stretching out far, too far, out to the edge –

of her saying that,

however dark the despair,

by sitting at the piano and playing,

improvising, toying, almost doodling, she could lift

it;

however briefly.