Books On the Fence
posted by on February 15 at 12:49 PM
So the Poetry Foundation has been commissioning cartoonists to turn poetry into comics. The newest one is A.E. Stallings’ poem Recitative. The artist they chose to illuminate the manuscript (so to speak) is R. Kikuo Johnson, who is a really good choice for this sort of thing. I love his art, but his stories are sometimes so minimalist as to be pointless. At the bottom of this page, there’s a link to Johnson’s cartoon of Recitative.
I have to say, having read the poem first, the cartoon second, and then gone back and read the poem again, that I can positively say that I’m not sure what to think. The art is gorgeous, but it seems almost too obvious. Or maybe the poem itself is obvious. Or do I just think that it’s obvious because it rhymes and the rhyme scheme is really obvious?
This one,by Jeffrey Brown, illustrating a poem by Russell Edson, is pretty good, I think, and proves that the idea has some merit. Is this a case of bad writing making a bad comic? Does it matter? Who can say?
The first three links don't work, at least not for me.
As for the last one, I like the poem a lot, and I like equating the ideas of disappearing and existence to birth and death, but I don't love the self-referentialness (yay made up words!) of a comic featuring a comic artist.
I'm not feeling it. I tried. It seems like a good idea, but the comic/poem thing does not make good on its promises.
Maybe it's because a good comic and a good poem are pretty much accomplishing the same goals, and one doesn't really enhance the other so much as distract.
Their SQL database is choking. Did they get the Slog equivalent of slashdotted?
I think the four of us busted their servers. Aislinn, I agree with you about most of Jeffrey Brown's work, but I think that it works in this one, because it's understandable even if you don't know that it's Jeffrey Brown. (And when did Jeffrey Brown have a kid? And why do I feel so sorry for that kid?)
Looks like they didn't change the number of connections on the server - the MySql database can't take the load:
"error: Cannot connect: Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client at /var/www/poetryfoundation.org/poetrycomp/database-connect.comp line 19"
Sigh.
I like it. I like it a lot. First, the adaptation may be literal, but it isn't linear. It still works like a poem, making you invent the connections between the staggered images.
But also, poetry and comics are two literary forms that tend to get ghettoized - ie. "only fanboys read comics, and only ivory tower types read poetry" - and deserve much wider readerships. Anything that encourages some crossover is a good thing.
As a personal case in point, I wasn't much of a poetry reader back in the day, yet I vividly remember reading a comic version of Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool" that opened up a whole new world. More please.
Got the "Recitative" link to work. Funny thing, I'm a poet who has recently started to read comics again and have pondered over how to marry the two. Some of Neil Gaiman's work is quite poetic.
Unfortunately, poetry just can't compete on it's own anymore against the other creative media. I heard Linda Bierds and her entourage read last night and felt like ramming my head against Hammering Man afterward. Well-crafted and clever but irrelevant.
This comix/poem hybrid could only be a good thing for American poetry. Unless poetry can seduce Youth, it dies.
Bummer that the links aren't working! I'd like to view this, but I'm getting error messages on every page. Grrr.
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