Another one cut from the book.
The cartoonist Tom Hart (Hutch Owen) has a fantastic blog called “Cartooning Like You Mean It,” and he’s been posting recently about mark-making, poetry, and drama. Here’s a clip from his post, “Drama vs. Poetry“:
Drama is the manipulation of characters and events in opposition with each other. In its most extreme, it is superficial and distancing: tired action movies about good guys and bad guys. In it’s best examples, characters are deeply drawn and communicate, questioning and exploring the themes of the drama both in their behaviors and thoughts.
Poetry I would argue is the single image designed to provoke or evoke other impressions and ideas in the mind and inner eye of the audience. Poetic image is created using the images of our society: people, places, and time etc. At its most extreme and superficial, it is cloying, simplistic, Hallmark cards and childish posters. At its most astute, it uses hints of drama to offer up enough action, enough motion and opposition between the characters and other elements to suggest worlds within the audience and to allow meditative space within them.
(Emphasis mine.)
I’ve often thought of my poems as little scenes from stories told in images made out of words. In fact, when I started making them, almost four years ago, they began as writing exercises to generate ideas for short stories. (Short stories are what they teach you to write in college, and so I tried to write them.)
In the book, Meg and I tried to string the poems together in an order that suggested a rise and fall, a sense of time and place, of movement…of some kind of narrative.
We’ll find out in another year whether we succeeded. The new sale date is February 9, 2010. A year from two days ago.
Who even knows where we’ll all be by then?
(Thanks to Derik Badman for pointing out the Hart quote.)
Another year… that is excruciating for all of us.
It’s killing me. I’ve read a lot of writers who say that their books are really strange to them afterwards. “I was a different person when I wrote that.” I feel that way already.
That’s pretty cool that you where trying to find a rhythm with the poems, putting it together like that. When I self-published a book of poems, it was an easy decision because once I looked at them together, the order almost suggested itself. Did you find that difficult at all?
And I’d also have to say that the feeling doesn’t go away (being a different person). Even though the time lapse is significantly less in self-pub, the same feeling is there. I think it’s only partly to do with the time and more to do with seeing everything collected and the experience of putting it together.
Todd:
I let my wife pick the order. She saw the patterns and themes a lot better than I did. I printed out the whole batch of poems and handed them to her. What she came up with made total sense to me, so I just kind of pruned that back a bit, reshuffled it.
It occurs to me that if you handed the batch of poems to 100 different people, you’d get 100 different books. Just as if you hand 100 people one newspaper article, you’ll get 100 different poems.
So, in a lot of ways it’s Meghan’s book, and not mine!