Proposal of Final Project and Paper

Final Project:

I'd like to make a chapbook that studies the interaction and integration of poetic text and image as hybrid. Since I'm by no means an expert on the subject, I plan to do this by creating a series of text+visual experiments in the form of poems that are also comics. The chapbook will be a compilation of those experiments accompanied by abstracts of them. Ten of these sounds like a good number.

Final Paper:

This critical analysis will explore some of the same concepts I am taking on with the chapbook, only it will explore a specific text (or texts--TBD) in-depth. My focus will be on the interaction of text and visual and, more specifically, the poetics of the work as a whole.

Moving forward

Thanks, Abi.

I am especially interested in how to use text in a poem in a way which feels somehow other than dialogue, intertitles (as in the text that was used in silent movies in between shots) or "voiceover narration" (which I tend to really abhor in movies, and often consider the sign of a lazy filmmaker, although there are exceptions: have you seen Godard's Alphaville? That's inventive and poetic narration!) What else can be done with text in a poem-comic? How can it feel integral, as considered as the images?

I think of the ongoing problem in musicals: most musicals have songs (and dance numbers) that are superfluous and incongruous in some ways to the main "text" (plot/action) of the movie or play. The best musicals are often the ones that find a way to make the songs and dances truly move the whole of the thing forward, having these (admittedly odd) bursts of lyrics and music and movement feel crucial to the movie or play's ideas and characters, but also to the overall feel, aesthetic, tone of the piece.

I wonder how poem-comics can deal with the text-image conundrum in an equally productive/exciting way.

And speaking of which, and of moving forward: can your next post be your final project and paper proposal? Bonus points if you can bring in ideas and examples from the books we've looked at thus far--including, perhaps, exercises and assignments and techniques from Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, from which I'm not going to assign you anything specific, because it's such a technical book and I want you to just take what you need from it, and I'm not totally sure of which skills you feel you most want to or need to work on.

(A last, side note about Drawing Words and the image-text question: I like how Drawing Words talks about the importance of lettering style. While a pretty technical discussion, it might help with thinking about how to integrate text?)