I began writing poems fifteen years ago while I was in college. One day I was in the library, working on a term paper, when I came across a book of contemporary poetry. I don’t remember the title of the book or any of the titles of the poems except one: “Frankenstein’s Daughter.” The poem was wild, almost rude, and nothing like the rhyme-and-meter poetry I had read in high school. I had always thought that poetry was flowery writing about sunsets and walks on the beach, but that library book contained direct and sometimes shocking poetry about dogs, junked cars, rundown houses, and TVs. I checked the book out, curious to read more.

Soon afterward, I started filling a notebook with my own poems. At first I was scared, partly because my poetry teacher, to whom this book is written for, was a serious and strict man who could see the errors in my poems. Also, I realized the seriousness of my devotion. I gave up geography to study poetry, which a good many friends said offered no future. I ignored them because I liked working with words, using them to reconstruct the past, which has always been a source of poetry for me.

When I first studied poetry, I was single-minded. I woke to poetry and went to bed with poetry. I memorized poems, read English poets because I was told they would help shape my poems, and read classical Chinese poetry because I was told that it would add clarity to my work. But I was most taken by the Spanish and Latin American poets, particularly Pablo Neruda. My favorites of his were the odes ― long, short-lined poems celebrating common things like tomatoes, socks and scissors. I felt joyful when I read these odes, and when I began to write my own poems, I tried to remain faithful to the common things of my childhood — dogs, alleys (小巷), my baseball mitt (手套) and the fruit of the valley, especially the orange. I wanted to give these things life, to write so well that my poems would express their beauty.

I also admired our own country’s poetry. I saw that our poets often wrote about places where they grew up or places that impressed them deeply. James Wright wrote about Ohio and West Virginia, Philip Levine about Detroit, Gary Snyder about the Sierra Nevadas and about Japan, where for years he studied Zen Buddhism (禅宗佛教). I decided to write about the San Joaquin Valley, where my hometown, Fresno, is located. Some of my poems are absolute observations and images of nature — the orange yards, the Kings River, the Sequoias (红杉). I fell in love with the valley, both its ugliness and its beauty, and quietly wrote poems about it to share with others.

I start every summer with the best of intentions:to attack one big book from the past, a classic that I was supposed to have read when young and ambitious. Often the pairings of books and settings have been purely accidental: "Moby Dick" on a three-day cross-country train trip: “The Magic Mountain” in a New England beachside cottage with no locks on the doors, no telephones or televisions in the rooms, and little to do beyond row on the salt pond. Attempting "The Man Without Qualities" on a return to Hawaii, my native state, however, was less fruitful: I made it through one and a quarter volumes (册), then decided that I'd got the point and went swimming instead.

But this summer I find myself at a loss. I’m not quite interested in Balzac, say, or “Tristram Shandy.” There’s always War and Peace, which I've covered some distance several times, only to get bogged down in the "War" part, set it aside for a while, and realize that I have to start over from the beginning again, having forgotten everyone’s name and social rank. How appealing to simply fall back on a favorite-once more into “The Waves” or “Justine,” which feels almost like cheating, too exciting and too much fun to properly belong in serious literature.

And then there’s Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black,” which happens to be the name of my favorite cocktail (鸡尾酒) of the summer, created by Michael Cecconi at Savoy and BackForty. It is easy to drink, and knocking back three or four seems like such a delightful idea. Cecconi's theory: "I take whatever’s fresh at the green market and turn it into liquid." The result is a pure shot of afternoon in the park, making one feel cheerful and peaceful all at once, lying on uncut grass with eyes shut, sun beating through the lids...

Whenever you read text, your brain processes the visual stimuli (刺激物) to create meaning and understand the content. Chances are, you don’t pay much attention to the way the information is presented- particularly the font (字体) choice. That’s because your main target is reading comprehension, not aesthetics.

Although typography(排印) is missed by most of us, it’s essential in making texts legible, readable and appealing for audiences. Beyond the visual aspect, research shows that fonts play a significant role in the mental processes of understanding that happen while we read. A font’s impact on the way you learn and memorize information might be hard to notice consciously, but your brain is certainly tuned in. Perhaps surprisingly, hard-to-read fonts such as Bodoni, Comic Sans, or Monotype Corsiva are better for memorizing information than fonts like Arial or Times New Roman, according to some studies.

“Difficulty can function as an alarm signal, giving the reader a sense that the task is challenging and will require mental effort,” says Daniel Oppenheimer, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and one of a 2010 study authors, “Additionally, slowing down the reading speed to deal with the disfluency may increase the probability of spotting errors in a text.”

Font characteristics such as style, size and color play a role in information retention memory or recall as well, says Stephen Banham, a typography lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Experiments have proved a U-shape relationship between font size and memory: Large-font items may predict higher recall regardless of style, but very small font sizes can also introduce a desirable difficulty.

A document’s specific method of formatting information also makes an impact. Using font styles like bold or italics to indicate significance can also improve memory. That’s because people are better able to remember information they consider important, says Oppenheimer. Researchers found that bolded text has a higher recall than text in italic or regular styles, regardless of the font size. However, if an entire document is bolded, the emphasis is lost, and readers can no longer spot vital passages.