All my career I’ve obsessed with a dichotomy between what I call drama and poetry. The inclination more towards story or towards imagery that exists outside of it’s dramatic context….The Mamet/Herzog polarity is this same dichotomy. “What Happens Next” vs “Ecstatic Truth.”

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.