THE POETICS OF COMICS: BILL RANDALL ON THE POETRY FOUNDATION'S POETRY COMICS SERIES

Speaking of The Comics Journal (see two posts below), I just picked up issue 288, the first issue of the magazine in its new, squatter format. I was pleasantly surprised to see, near the back of the magazine, Bill Randall’s well-argued critique of the Poetry Foundation’s The Poem as Comic Strip series, edited by Ed Park.

Let me be blunt: I have yet to see many projects undertaken by the Poetry Foundation that have been anything but ill-conceived, dumbed-down, superfluous, and/or annoying—especially with respect to contemporary poetry and poetics. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History has probably done a better job of grappling with hip-hop than the Poetry Foundation will ever do with the art of poetry as practiced today in America.

Not surprisingly, I agree with most of Randall’s critique. As he emphasizes, there’s an enormous difference between merely illustrating a poem and actually doing something analogous to poetry in comics; and overwhelmingly, the comics artists participating in the project have produced illustrated poetry.

Series editor Ed Park describes the project as “a way to help readers discover (or rediscover) our archive,” explaining that “poetryfoundation.org has invited some of today’s most vital graphic novelists to interpret a poem of their choice from the more than 4,500 poems in our archive, reaching from Beowulf to the present.”

While this is not exactly an invitation to comics artists to merely illustrate one of the poems in the Foundation’s archive—an engaged reading of “interpret” would allow for comics that didn’t even use a poem’s words at all, to instead (for instance), focus on and interpret in comics a poem’s formal or tonal qualities—Park either assumes he’ll get illustration, and has thus far gotten what he wanted or he underestimates the literal-mindedness of the artists he’s asked to participate.

I rather suspect Park is getting what he wanted. And much of the Web site’s audience would agree. “I've never seen anything quite like this,” one enthusiastic comments field author notes. “Art and writing--my two favorites--combined.” (Apparently, that author has never seen so much as a photo caption, let alone a comic strip.) That the project has been successful for the Poetry Foundation and its not-terribly-demanding audience is inarguable.

But to the extent that I’m interested in—and indeed, devote much of my time practicing—a comics art informed by contemporary poetics, I find the project every bit as brain-dulling, irrelevant, and annoying as any other Poetry Foundation venture.

That said, Randall is ultimately using the Poetry Foundation’s poetry illustration project as a convenient straw man in a much broader argument. Randall opens the review with a nod to a previous Comics Journal essay by Austin English, whom Randall quotes as claiming that “we’re in the full flowering of comics as poetry.”

I’m generally sympathetic to English’s claim, although I might drop that word “full.” I would need to read English’s essay—if anyone knows the issue in which it appeared, please let me know—before deciding whether or not we agree on what constitutes “comics as poetry.” But knowing a bit about English’s interests from reading some of his other criticism, I’m guessing we’re not too far apart in our interests.

Before moving on to critique the illustrated poetry on the Foundation’s Web site, Randall makes a distinction between “lyrical” and “poetic,” citing Otto Soglow’s line as something lyrical, but not exactly poetic. (Soglow created the “Little King” strip, and before that, “The Ambassador.”) Fair enough, and I can’t speak for English, but I personally would never argue that Soglow’s work was terribly “poetic.” Its closest analogy, in language, would be the joke, or maybe even the epigram.

Bill Randall: “But what about the place where poetry actually lives: the words?”

Well, but what about the place where comics criticism lives? And fiction. And memoir. And journalism. And jokes and epigrams. And speech. And, and, and. Poetry is just one of numerous language-based arts and applications.

No one—certainly not Randall—would argue the impossibility of comics as journalism, memoir, fiction, jokes, and so on. And, as anyone who has read Steven Wright’s or Groucho Marx’s jokes will tell you, they focus on language no less so than any poet. The same is true of Stein and Joyce, of Montaigne, of Heraclitus, of countless language artists working in fiction, memoir, the essay, and so on.

Randall gets caught up in and limited by what I think is a common over-simplification of poetry: that poetry is density of word and image. Yes and no. Jokes are, too. Some fiction is, too. Heck, Calvin Trillin’s Feeding a Yen, a book about food, offers as much.

What distinguishes poetry from other language arts is not so much density (although it’s not a terribly inaccurate thing to say), and certainly not a preponderance of “image” (which is inaccurate if you’re reading non-mainstream poetry), but in the particular ways in which poetry accrues meaning. I’d need a whole book to explain that, but, to counter with my own gross oversimplification, poetry accrues meaning vertically rather than horizontally. To a much greater degree than fiction, memoir, jokes, and essays, poetry rewards re-reading, and especially so any re-reading that does not necessarily go through the poem word for word.

Another problem with Randall’s analysis is that he seems to concentrate on comics made from poems. “Comics as poetry” does not, in my understanding, mean this. It means comics that behave more like poetry. (Real poetry; not Ted Kooser’s or Diane Wakoski’s or A.E. Stallings’ or Russel Edson’s, most of which behaves more like fiction or memoir than poetry.)

The one example of “comics as poetry” that Randall cites as particularly successful, Warren Craghead’s How to Be Everywhere, is a comic made up of words from Guillaume Apollinaire. It’s worth noting that Apollinaire was a genuinely great poet. But it’s much more to the point that Craghead did not illustrate a single poem by Apollinaire. His book is a creatively collaged “biography” of Apollinaire using words from numerous poems and, perhaps, some of his fiction, essays, or letters.

It’s a brilliant book. And it is, I agree, “comics as poetry.” (Or, for that matter, “poetry as comics.”) And that has everything to do with the fact that Craghead used Apollinaire’s words as raw material rather than slavishly copying down one of his poems. The text itself, had he submitted it to Jacket would not be out of place with other work on the site. I can name countless poets who have created great poems collaging together other poets’ words.

It’s also worth noting how Craghead approaches the individual page in that book. I suspect he takes his cue from Apollinaire’s numerous visual poems—or “calligrams”—Craghead’s pages have something of the rhythm of Apollinaire’s “La Colombe Poignardee” and “Le Jet D'Eau”.

And, if we abandon the idea that “comics as poetry” must use pre-written poetry for its text, and that, instead, it must function more like poetry than, say, fiction or essay or joke, there are, I would argue, numerous examples out there. I think of certain work done or published in the last 5-10 years or so by Richard Hahn, Marc Bell, Leah Hayes, Matt Madden, Jerel (Johnson), Gary Panter, Peter Blegvad, Sakura Maku, Kevin Huizenga, John Hankiewicz, Andrei Molotiu, Blutch, and—no surprise—myself and Austin English. I could no doubt list a dozen others, but my comics are all in the living room, not here in the bedroom, and it’s about time for me to leave for work.

Again, there may not be exactly a “full” flowering of comics as poetry underfoot, but there is an increasing amount of work that either takes its cues from poetry or poetic form, or which engages the reader in ways closer to that of poetry than other kinds of writing, or for that matter, comics.

[Update: I've written more on this topic here.]