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Posts tagged "comics as poetry"
Why I like comics
Box Brown asked me to write something about why I liked comics, but it was right after my kid was born, and I wasn’t thinking in complete thoughts, so I just drew a little diagram. (Most of my writing starts with drawing diagrams like this one…)
This also doubles as an awesome American Elf tribute!
Thank you to Austin Kleon creator of the books Steal Like an Artist and Newspaper Blackout.
COMICS DOPE is a regular feature celebrating the comics artform.
Wallace Stevens’ “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” from The Collected Poems (animated by Lilli Carre)
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather.
Musa McKim and Philip Guston, I thought I would never write anything down again, ink on paper, 19x24 inches
Some background on Guston’s collaborations with poets:
The Poem-Pictures constituted a series of drawings first initiated by Guston in 1970 in collaboration with poets including Bill Berkson, Clark Coolidge, Robert Creeley and William Corbett. Guston was interested in the interplay of words and images. In a letter to Bill Berkson in 1975, he wrote, “It is a strange form for me –excites me in that it does make a new thing– a new image–words and images feeding off each other in unpredictable ways. Naturally, there is no ‘illustration’ of text, yet I am fascinated by how text and image bounce into and off each other.”
Interesting note: McKim and Guston were wife and husband.
Poetic moments then, are moments abstracted, crafted by a creator maybe from specific meanings, but with an atmosphere around those meanings for the audience to imagine further. Not random moments, but considered and thoughtful combination of images, language, ideas and a conscious understanding of the spaces between them.
This is how my book works — each poem is a combination of images, but then the poem itself is an image, which is then juxtaposed with the poem behind and in front of it, and the “cutting” of the poems is the magic of how the book reads. There is no explicit narrative — any narrative is inferred in the spaces in b/w poems.
David Mamet, in his terrific “On Directing Film” discusses the need to make the story happen in “the cuts”, that is, in the transition from image to image. He is adamant about knowing the point you’re trying to communicate so you can do it via the transitions. Mamet is smart- he implores film makers to know what it is they want to say, but to say it indirectly, not with narration or “illustration” as I say above, but artfully, with transitions and space in between, so the viewer can become involved.
I will also point to the cartoonist Seth on poetry vs. comics:
It seems to me that the language of poetry is very dependant on setting up images and juxtaposing them against each other. A poet will create an image in the first two lines of his poem and then he will create another in the next two lines, and so on. I do find this jumping from image to image in poetry to be a very interesting, comic-like element. Many poems are almost like word comics.
K. Parille takes a look at Charles Schulz’s punctuation in Peanuts:
His work is only one example of the ways that text in comics — and especially in word balloons — is liberated from the kinds of ‘rules’ that govern prose. It’s a way that comics can be aligned with poetry, which shows far more openness and freedom with punctuation. Schulz, for example, almost never ends sentences with a period, a standard stop in essays, short stories, and novels (of course, he makes extensive use of ? and !). I tend to think of balloons as more like a blank page of poetry than a blank page of prose — a place that’s fairly wide open.
“Here’s an example, for me, of a perfect comic book. Twenty single page stories, poems really, of shine-y teenage wonderment told from a girl’s POV. Short little narrative voiceovers accompany spare stylized symbols of figures carefully arranged. It all feels so casual, like a private notebook but each page is dense and an architectural marvel of design and sequencing.”
- Frank Santoro on Ron Rege’s BOYS
