It seems to me that the language of poetry is very dependant on setting up images and juxtaposing them against each other. A poet will create an image in the first two lines of his poem and then he will create another in the next two lines, and so on. I do find this jumping from image to image in poetry to be a very interesting, comic-like element. Many poems are almost like word comics.—The cartoonist Seth on poetry and comics
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this recently, but in the beginning, I called my poems “Newspaper Blackout Comics.” The first batch I ever did explicitly juxtaposed image and text:
Other examples: here and here.
My old creative writing teacher used to tell me that a poet “thinks in images” and a fiction writer thinks in terms of “character and plot.” I’m not sure it’s that cut and dry, but I think it sheds a lot of light on why I find traditional prose fiction so incredibly hard, and poetry and comics so incredibly fun.
And speaking of poetry and comics, one of the main characters in Chris Harding’s excellent WE THE ROBOTS webcomic has started a poetry website:
So hilarious, and so true. Be sure to visit his site for even more.
And speaking of mean comments, here’s a new phenomenon for me: mean-spirited spam.
As if it wasn’t hard enough for me to get up in the morning!
That’s a great equation. I’ve had a little Wallace Stevens revival lately. Some of my favorite poems of his are the ones that a broken up into numbered stanzas, like “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “Variations on a Summer Day” and “Bouquet of Belle Scavoir”.
I like the explicit breaks to let the images linger and gel (or, more likely, it’s just that my short attention span can’t handle more than 4-6 lines). Might also be why I tend to like the traditional poetic forms, b/c they make for economy in the writing. Poetry and comics force some hard choices…
I’m with you about line breaks and spacing — when I did “traditional” poetry in college, it was the thing that really excited me…how the words floated in the space.
Is there a Wallace Stevens collection that you recommend?
I swear I’m not the one spamming you :)
I’ve got Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poems (ISBN-13: 978-0679726692). I can’t speak for any competing collections, but it’s got most of his work in there.
First : I love your blackout poems. :)
Second (and the real reason I decided to step out of the curtain of Internet anonymity and comment) : I get those spam messages too, and at first I thought they were for watch faces, or clock faces. Now I see they are videos? Videos of what? Me and my stupid face? I don’t want to find out. They seem to be swarming to you though. For the record, I’m going to counter them and say : I don’t think you have a stupid face. (And neither do I, spam bots!!)