Black Ice and Rain by Michael Donaghy is a poem about a drunk man at a party talking to you (the reader) in a separate room about dark moments in his life. The poem slips and slides all over the place, from polite small talk to potential confessions; I decided to try and mimic this in the layout of the type, whenever the poem directs itself towards the reader, it slips into a different column, as if the story was hitting patches of conversational black ice.

The brief was to imagine this poem in an anthology for teenagers to encourage them to read poetry. I hated reading poetry, but I enjoyed typography, so I decided to give it a go. I decided to target teenagers who are just about to enter 6th form/college, making the book 50% blank, allowing them to graffiti and vandalise the book as much as they wish. This was an attempt to reflect their newly found freedom; poetry is no longer a classroom subject but is now something you can take on as a passion and do with as you please.

The 'teacher' in red biro crosses out words for the reader to replace and analyse, encouraging them to think how they would format the poem if it was theirs. After this, on the right is a blank space to graffiti their own words with added contextual flare. This is how I treated my textbooks at school, and I'm optimistic others did the same. This book encourages textbook graffiti and vandalism as a form of education, rebelling against the school.

The final part of this project was; how will the anthology be advertised to the target audience? Initially, I could have gone down the easy social media route because teens use social media.
But that was too easy; instead, I decided to locate several easy to see walls around my local college (this can be applied anywhere). Next, I would get local graffiti artists to tag the wall in their unique styles, utilising quotes from the poems, ideally paired up with QR marks to find further information.