Re: Ellen Forney Exercise

So now I'm asking myself, how does this connect to what I like in poetry?

I like my poetry to be a bit on the weird side--but still beautiful in some sense. When poetry is strange, it makes things new and exciting. The bizarre and grotesque are compelling to me; they quench my curiosity. I think that one of my most dominant (and valuable) traits is curiosity. It also shows how something repulsive can be beautiful, and something beautiful can be repulsive.

How palatable do you like your comix art to be? What about the text?

I love beautifully-drawn comix--but I don't mind something quirky or stylized now and then (this sounds almost like an inverse to my answer about poetry). I must say that I am drawn to disarmingly beautiful illustrations. I used to be much less interested in poorly-drawn or messy or ugly comix, but I am now more intrigued in them. However, even amidst those I tend toward comix that look intentionally drawn, whether they are beautiful in the traditional sense or not.

The text, however, I prefer to be odder, uglier, or more uncomfortable. Perhaps something about that dissonance does the same thing as the poetry I like; it shows the connections between the beautiful and the repulsive.

So I suppose I might say that I like my poetry and comix to be either beautifully repulsive or repulsively beautiful.

Re: Ellen Forney Exercise

Above is a comic of Meg Reilly's poem,

"fox-fur"

the shipwreck washed me ashore
i was filled up with debris
the bank was red clay mixed with silt
i could not speak
there were minnows in my lungs
my hair was fiery, an orange hue
there were people gathering me
discussing whether they should carry me
away from the water, but the water seemed my home
finally the man in charge stepped forward
he was an auburn creature
he was a fox, with fox-fur
standing upright on his hind legs
what is your fantasy
to have sex with two men
what is your fantasy
to have you dress up like a fox
and come to bed
he needed no deliberation
but approached my body impish on the sand
he stroked my head

Ellen Forney exercise

I think what I love most about Ellen Forney is that her comix satisfy both my desire for beautiful art and "edgy"/confessional text. Her drawing style seems to me to be conventionally "good" or "pretty"--the people are good-looking in a standard illustrative way, the lines are very clean, the style is, well, stylish. While I love underground comics--this is, in fact, the only kind of comics I know deeply--I am often unable to get into work by artists who use a deliberately ugly or messy or disturbing illustration style, even though I'm very drawn to text that is deliberately subversive, disturbing, etc. (And here I'll say that I'm a little horrified to realize that I "assigned" you--or you chose, but from a list I provided--a book with as much salacious content as I Love Led Zeppelin. It's really dirty!)

I think part of what makes Forney so interesting is that thing we keep coming back to: juxtaposition. In her work, a very lovely drawing accompanies what might otherwise be considered text that is repulsive (in the sense that people could be repulsed by it). I think the palatable prettiness of the image sort of saves AND heightens the intensity of the word.

So now I'm asking myself, how does this connect to what I like in poetry? No answers from me on that front just yet, but what about you? How palatable do you like your comix art to be? What about the text?

And for an exercise, try doing a very "pretty" or "tidy" comic for an "ugly" or "messy" poem (yours or, perhaps more fun, someone else's). Or try a very messy or ugly style to accompany a poem that is traditional...and traditionally beautiful.