The Ivory Tower brings more than just words

Ivory Tower Launch Party

WHERE: Mississippi Room, Coffman Memorial Union

WHEN: Sat., May 9

WHO: Lucy Michelle

PRICE: Free

Let’s face it — literary magazines get a bad rap. But when thinking about The Ivory Tower, don’t picture a bunch of low-budget writers with a tiny group of pretentious readership. This year’s Ivory Tower is a whole new breed of literary magazine. In place of a dutiful selection of one story after another is a hyper-visual multimedia collection that is expertly arranged. Each page touts enthralling graphic design and lit selections.

The final product is an artistic extravaganza, with a story on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and still life photographs of plastic Target bags. Around stories like “Lt. Miner Drinks Some Coffee,” a journey through the breakdown of a long-standing marriage and the discontent of a returning veteran, the pages are lined with smatterings of green letters that highlight the fluidity of language and sensory overload that assaults our consciousness day after day.

The back cover of The Ivory Tower is a comic called “Serious People Agree: Life is a Game to be Played,” a satirical journey through the lives of solemn existentialists, with ways to amp up life by choosing moves carefully and plugging more quarters into the machine constantly.

The literary magazine is part of a yearlong class at the University of Minnesota where students sign up and are then elected to positions.

One of this year’s co-editors-in-chief, Meghan Hanson , an art, English and art history senior, said, “The goal of the project was to take 20 visions and turn them into one magazine.”

Co-Editor-in-Chief and art senior Dixon Bordiano said the crew uses “the golden age of magazines as an inspiration, with both images and words used to create a spread.” The team worked from back issues of the Ivory Tower, which started in the early 1950s as a bimonthly insert in The Minnesota Daily. “We collected lots of literary magazines and tried to amp up the design,” Hanson said.

Hanson and Bordiano aimed to make the issue “a platform for the [student] writers to build the community.” They took into account the type of reading that students do and focused on integrating serious, metaphorical literature and light-hearted prose to encompass the attitude of campus.

The Ivory Tower is not just what lies in between the covers, though. This year, the team worked on amalgamating visual arts with video and music, all of which are available on the Ivory Tower website. There you can listen to spoken-word poetry, such as “A Quiet Dinner with a Friend” by Rhael Laramy , a rolling stream-of-consciousness following the destruction of a friendship over scrambled eggs. The site also features Roster McCabe’s new jazzy-rock single “Drift,” with rolling saxophones complimenting the breathy vocals of lead singer Alex Steele.

The issue also has poetry by Lewis Hyde, a former University student named one of the most influential writers of his generation, which has been reprinted from a 1967 publication of the Ivory Tower. His poem “My Friend Cries Sometimes” is an angst-ridden exploration of a female friend, her tired yearnings and turbulent exhaustion.

The distribution of copies began on campus this week, and the Ivory Tower team will be setting copies on newsstands and, as Hanson says, “handing them out on campus guerilla-style.” The official release party will feature the musical stylings of Lucy Michelle (a la Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lapelles).

With the year’s work winding to a close, Dominican writer Junot Díaz offers some advice in the final pages of the magazine: “Each of us lucky enough to be in the University stands in for 1,000 people better than us. So what do we do for our privilege? We do WORK.”