Winding down...

I like how you're tying the surrealist possibilities of poetry and comix together--I do think that's one of the things that make them a natural (if untapped) match for one another.

So we're closing in on the end here. I'd love to hear more as you start to work on your final project. What are you thinking about prioritizing? What have you gleaned from all our reading about what would be most exciting/new/effective to try yourself? What still seem to be obstacles toward making poetry-comics?

Simic on Surrealism

A relevant quote from Charles Simic's essay, "Negative Capability and its Children."

"Surrealism suspects language and its representational powers. In its view, there’s no intimacy between language and the world; the old equation, word equals object, is simply a function of habit. In addition, there’s the problem of simultaneity of experience versus the linear requirements of grammar. Grammar moves in time. Only figurative language can hope to grasp the simultaneity of experience. Therefore, it’s the connotative and not the denotative aspect of language that is of interest, the spark that sets off the figurative chain reaction and transcends the tyranny of the particular."

Adrian Tomine's 32 Stories

There is something very disarming about Tomine's works. He focuses on the internal monologue, imperfect yet lovable characters, and the disfunct in everyday relationships. One interesting thing about his work is his varied use of voice. It can be narrative boxes, self-conscious thought bubbles, or various styles of speech bubbles. In the case of the following comic, there are more thoughts written out than dialogue. He focuses on the internal, the confessional, the anxiety of the protagonist. Even within the comic, Tomine’s character questions the taboo of communicating with strangers. It is a criticism of a social wall that is all too similar to McCloud’s “wall of ignorance.”(mentioned on pg. 198 of Understanding Comics).

Tomine uses the thought bubble to show his characters’ reactions to the realities within the comics. One thought spirals into another, and the reflection that goes on between each uttered speech is overwhelming!

Tomine sometimes emphasizes the personal by pushing the illustrations and text toward the picture plane. It borders on the surreal at times (Tomine also illustrates some of his own dreams as comics), and this parallels the methods of the surrealist poets--to make something strange and new in order to understand or describe it better. The figurative nature of these illustrations is well-demonstrated in the "Back Break" comics and other [semi-]autobiographical comics, such as the ones involving peanut allergies. It is interesting that Tomine seems to reserve much of this figurative vocabulary for the depiction of himself. This makes perfect sense, as the semi-surreal images act to breach the wall of ignorance, showing Tomine's internal workings to the reader.

In some of the later comics from "Optic Nerve," Tomine tends more toward the realist poetics, where the idea is to portray reality as real as possible, and let the subjectivity exist both in poet and reader. This seems to be less of a breaking through of the wall of ignorance, and more of an acceptance of the wall, and perhaps a suggestion that the wall is merely a mirror--that both sides will reflect the same reaction to reality.

Tomine does just this on the last page of "Anniversary," where he omits the internal monologue entirely. One might assume the implication of a monologue, but this deliberate omission seems to recognize that humans do not always think in words. The silence of it says so much.

The same silence exists in "Smoke," but Tomine distinguishes between the two works. "Anniversary" is neatly and meticulously, but Tomine specifies that "Smoke" came out automatically. He prefers the spontanaety of "Smoke." This reminds me both of automatic writing and of spontaneous prose--the goals and methods of both processes being strikingly similar: to take the energy of the poet and transport it in its purest form to the reader through the page. The poet must avoid self-censorship (something Tomine admits that he struggles against) and place the thoughts immediately onto the page, without stopping.

It is almost as if Tomine's style travels through modern poetic movements--I am thrilled to be able to observe these movements on a smaller level within this selection of Tomine's works.

turn it down

Final projects

These are a bit broad: can you refine as soon as you've given them some more thought? I'd love a working plan for both: methods, texts, ideas for both. You could even storyboard them!

In the meantime, shall we talk about some other books we've got on hand, too? You've got Adrian Tomine and I don't, but that's ok, since I know his work well--you could post about him soon, and then we could move on to talk about the little Mary Ruefle chapbook, which should be fun, since that's MORE poem than comic (as opposed to more comic than poem, which is the majority of what we've been looking at, yes?).

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?)