READING THE VISUAL LYRIC IN POETRY COMICS

Abstract: “Reading the Visual Lyric in Poetry Comics” presents an introduction to the

history and concept of poetry comics. Poetry comics include adaptations of poems into the

comics medium and some wordless comics and experimental comics. A definition of lyric

poetry provides a working taxonomy to delimitate the boundaries of the poetry comics

genre. Theoretical considerations regarding poetry, a brief overview of some of the

theoretical debates concerning poetry and postmodern poetry are described along with the

implications of adding the semiotic or visual analysis to visual poetry or poetry comics.

Some close readings offer examples of how the theoretical mixes with the visual nature of

poetry comics and the names of other artists producing poetry comics are provided.

Various genres find expression within the comics medium. A quick perusal of the

shelves in any comics shop will yield up fictional stories, adaptations of novels and film,

history and historical fiction, biography and autobiography. Experimental works

incorporating the surreal, abstract expressionism, cubism and free form also exist. And,

within story genres one will find drama, adventure/superhero, mystery, science fiction,

fantasy and humor among others. One genre that may come as a surprise is poetry and yet

its presence has a long history within the comics medium. Poetry comics comprise several

sub-genres of form. The most elementary types include adaptations of already existing

poems (including illustrated poems) and within the genre of poetry adapted for comics one

will find examples where the visual text simply models or parallels the written texts and

more complex adaptations where the visual text parodies, adds an element of satire or

engages in cultural critiques on the poem. Another sub-genre includes original poems that

integrate both visual and written text (though some examples pre-date comics and are not

considered comics). There are also wordless poetry comics and examples of comics not

necessarily created as poems but “act” as poems (some minimalist comics fit within this

category).

Poetry comics, sometimes referred to as visual poetry makes possible the application

of postmodern critiques to the comics medium. The majority of poetry comics fall within

the parameters of the lyric. On its most basic level, literary handbooks and introductory

texts (Homan and Harmon, Kennedy and Strand and Boland) define lyric poetry as short

poems based on personal experience, subjectivity, exploration into the emotions,

imagination and melody. Elder Olsen mapped out a geography of the boundaries of the

lyric and offered the following: “We have three basic lyrical phases: that of the private

sphere, which involves the continuity of expression; that of the verbal act, which involves

the continuity of address; and that of the colloquy, which involves the continuity of

interchange or inter-action. All of these may entail the momentary (or elementary) or the

sequential” (64).

Recently, lyric poetry has become the subject of debate among literary theorists as to

its place within theoretical considerations. According to E. Warwick Slinn’s assessment of

this debate, poetry’s marginalized status within postmodern criticism appears “to come

down to questions about the accessibility of poetry as a tool for political criticism…. [T]he

formalist demands of poetry would seem too pronounced to satisfy desire for a broader

based social and cultural criticism” (57). Another attack on poetry’s critical status is due to

its “allegedly monologic character” (Eskin 379). Slinn and others (Eskin; Haynes) do not

agree with these assessments. Slinn offers a model for poetry analysis within the context of

current theory and suggests the use of performative theory as a means to put to rest the

above questions of accessibility and Eskin offers support for poetry’s dialogicity. In

addition to these revisions, academic discussions on Bakhtin which reassess his views on

poetry and the introduction of methods that apply his theories to the visual arts should

prove especially useful for analyzing poetry comics.

The basic elements of lyric poetry can exist exclusively on a semiotic level through

the visual (vis-à-vis wordless comics) and these elements can also find expression in

comics genres where both written and visual texts combine to express variations on the

lyric. This combination exhibits more than a simplistic illustration of a lyric poem on paper;

rather it reveals a complex dialog between image and text that generate diverse

interpretations. The end result, regardless of the type of poetry comics, presents a unique

dimension of the lyric poem and at the same time further demonstrates the richness,

diversity and malleability of the medium of comics in that it shows comics to contain

internal and external dialogicity.

The simplest and most elementary type of poetry comic is the straightforward

illustrated poem or adaptation for comic books. At present, speculation would suggest that

the first poem adapted to comics appeared in published form in the 1940s if not earlier.

This date seems reasonable as during this time Classics Illustrated published comics

adaptations of literature and Classics Illustrated #57, published in September, 1948,

adapted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s narrative poem, Hiawatha. Experimentation

combining poetry and pictures date back to 1946; however, further research is needed to

pinpoint a more accurate date for the first lyric poems adapted to comics.

Illustrated poems contain the full text of the poem with illustrations in the

background or off to one side of the text. Poe’s “Lines on Ale” provides a good

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Lines on Ale.” Edgar Allan Poe:The Raven

and Other Poems. Classics Illustrated. Illus. Gahan Wilson

working example where the illustration does little to add to or change the meaning of the

text. The main purpose is to simply provide a visual for the poem. Adaptations can serve

the same purpose as in Neil Cohn’s version of Keat’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Cohn’s

adaptation keeps the full text of the poem but places the lines in speech balloons and

provides a visual “narrative” for the poem. In his version #1 he stays “true” to the text and

offers serious drawings in a classic style while Dave Morice’s adaptation adds an element

of parody where the characters all have iconic “smiley faces” and the “wild eyes” are

mostly covered in key scenes adding a sense of “poetic” irony. The reader is presented with

a contrast between the serious lines and the cartoony, naïve drawings and as Whitlark notes,

“Morice sees Keats’s Romanticism as a cartoonlike view of life” (101). In this way,

illustrations can serve as a counterpoint and adaptations can potentially re-write the original

work and take an apparent monologic language “that finds itself on the side of the

implicitly repudiated official discourses of state and power” (Eskin 381) and add a double-

voiced or polyphonic dimension. When the images contradict or call into question the

Cohn, Neil. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”

authority of the text, this act creates a three-way dialog between text, image and

viewer/reader.

Another excellent example of this dialogic process exists in Blake’s

illuminated/illustrated poems. What makes Blake’s works especially appropriate is that he

created both the written text and visual text. His innovations predate comics and these

works are not considered comics, though some comics scholars may want to claim them as

a form of proto-comics, but the works without question combine visual and written text,

contain an element of fantasy and explore the human imagination. A close analysis will

reveal that the visual text is more than a simplistic illustration of the written text. George

Wingfield Digby notes that “[s]ometimes the pictorial symbol parallels or amplifies the

written one; sometimes it gives the contrasting aspect, or opposite and contrary point of

view” (qtd. in Whitlark 39). Though Whitlark has some reservations about certain

limitations in Digby’s readings of Blake’s images, he points out that Digby does recognize

the complexity of Blake’s art (42). W.J.T. Mitchell offers a more complete understanding

as he observes that Blake’s works offers a vision of a fallen world that separates temporal

and spatial phenomena and leaves it to the reader to make the connections (Whitlark 42).

Two poems from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience serve to

demonstrate the complexity of Blake’s designs and the added layers of interpretation that

combined visual and written texts can offer. “The Lamb” (from Songs of Innocence) and

“The Tiger” (from Songs of Experience) make good comparisons because the poems are

from the two opposing books and the two animals are seen as opposites of each other. A

lamb is typically seen as tranquil and docile while a tiger is typically seen as fierce and

aggressive. The poem, “The Tiger,” also invites comparisons to the lamb based on the line,

“Did he who made the lamb make thee?” (Blake). When analyzing the juxtaposition of the

visual and written texts from these poems, some evident contradictions emerge.

The general scene in “The Lamb” appears somewhat menacing and resembles an

impending storm whereas the text describes a tranquil environment, “Gave thee such a

tender voice,/Making all the vales rejoice?” (Blake). The sky in “The Tiger,” however, is

brighter. Though somewhat dark at the top, it is not as dark as the sky in “The Lamb” and

the sky directly behind the tiger resembles a sunrise more than a night scene. Again, this

appears to contradict the line, “In the forests of the night” (Blake). In addition to the

contradictions between the overall visual scene and the text’s description, an added

contradiction involving the principal animals exists. The lamb is not a small lamb but an

adult sheep. In this way it represents experience more than innocence. The difference

between the visual tiger and its textual description provides a more stark contrast. The tiger

resembles a large kitten with rounded features, big eyes and the hint of a smile on its face.

Its eyes are devoid of any “fire” and its overlarge fluffy feet lack any true “dread.” The

tiger seems more likely to have come out of a children’s toy shop rather than a “furnace.”

Blake, William. “The Lamb.” Blake, William. “The Tiger.”

Whitlark examines the complexities and contradictions in other examples from Blake

and suggests that many times Blake deals with notions of doubles, opposites and the zen-

like oneness of universals. A common idea that incorporates aspects of these concepts is

that a thought or mention of one concept automatically conjures its opposite. Therefore a

thought of existence brings to mind non-existence. In conjunction with the idea of

innocence is the idea that experience is a natural progression from innocence and is part of

a larger life-cycle. Experience as a natural process or as a result of natural curiosity can also

embody a level of innocence. The type of analysis mentioned so far also offers an

“illustrated” example of some of the complexities of poetry interpretation pointed out in

Wolosky:

Interpretations of lyric poetry often bisect in ways that suggest two halves of a brain

unable to communicate with one another. On one side are formal analysis and

theoretical reflection. On the other is historical reference, where the poem risks being

reduced to illustration or footnote for external concerns or perhaps becomes an

instance within a history of aesthetic movements. In either case history and formal

analysis oppose each other, while the theoretical status of the text remains that of a

freestanding, independent object, revelatory of its own constitution rather than

connected to exterior worlds (651).

Wolosky’s concept is also applicable in a semiotic sense when analyzing visual poetry in

general and especially visual adaptations of poems where the historical reference can allude

to both the original written text and iconic features of the visual text. In relation to the

visual text, the idea of “illustration” or “footnote” takes on added significance.

Another form of adaptation is, for lack of any official terminology, the free form

adaptation where a sense of play is pivotal and “free association” determines the nature of

the visual text. Noah Berlatsky offered a challenge in his blog The Hooded Utilitarian

when he presented an illustrated version of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen ways of looking at a

Blackbird.” His challenge, create illustrations that “act” like a Wallace Stevens poem. The

resulting adaptations echoed, in a visual sense, McHale’s “description” of postmodernist

texts where he states that these “texts typically propose not unitary but plural ontological

models, and ontological cuts do not just bound them and set them off from the real world,

but fissure their interior volumes as well” (19). The “reader” of these illustrations that act

like Wallace Stevens poems also encounter the visual equivalents of strategies of

foregrounding found in the postmodern lyric that includes “strategies of ‘realized

metaphor,’ which suspend the text between the literal and the figurative… strategies for

placing ‘subuniverses of meaning’ in confrontation… strategies for ‘laying bare’ the

material substrate of the poetic heterocosm… [and] strategies for incorporating

unassimilably ‘real’ materials in a poetic hetercosm… .” (27). The illustrations posted on

Berlatsky’s blog offers a striking visual representation and of McHale’s description of the

interplay that exists within postmodern texts.

The theoretical considerations presented above also offer rich and varied analysis to

other sub-genres of poetry comics. These other examples include the aforementioned

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

—Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking

at a Blackbird, Art: Noah Berlatsky

“I say now, Fernando, that on that day

The mind roamed as a moth roams,”

--Wallace Stevens, Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores

Art: Vom Marlowe

minimalist comics, wordless poetry comics and original works in poetry comics. The artists

and poets producing these works come from various countries, including the US and

Argentina and among them are Amy Bernier, John Bloomberg Rissman, Ernesto Priego,

James Kochalka, Gustavo Devese, Checha, Alberto Abeliza, German Cufre, Alfredo

Benavidez Bedoya, Fernando Calvi, Andrei Molotiu.

Berlatsky, Noah. “Illustrated Wallace Stevens.” The Hooded Utilitarian. 31, July, 2011.

Web. 21 April, 2012.

Blake, William. “The Lamb.” Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Ann Arbor,

Michigan: University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative

1998. Web. http://name.umdl.umich.edu/blake.0001.001

Blake, William. “The Tiger.” Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Ann Arbor,

Michigan: University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative

1998. Web. http://name.umdl.umich.edu/blake.0001.001

Cohn, Neil. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Webcomics Nation, 27 February, 2007. Web. 21

April, 2012.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Lyric and the Ontology of Poetry.” Poetics Today 8:1

(1987): 19-44. JSTOR. Web. 30 March, 2011.

Holman, C. Hugh and William Harmon. A Handbook to Literature. 3rd edition. New York:

Macmillan, 1992.

Kennedy, X. J. An Introduction to Poetry. Glenview, IL/London: Scott Foresman/Little

Brown Higher Education, 1990.

Olson, Elder. “The Lyric.” The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association,

Vol. 2, Papers of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Number 1. Poetic

Theory/Poetic Practice (1969): 59-66. JSTOR. Web. 29 March, 2011.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Lines on Ale.” Edgar Allan Poe:The Raven and Other Poems. Classics

Illustrated. Illus. Gahan Wilson. New York: Berkeley/First Publishing, 1990. Print.

Strand, Mark and Eavan Boland. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic

Forms. New York: Norton, 2001.

Whitlark, James. Illuminated Fantasy: From Blake’s Visions to Recent Graphic Fiction.

London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988.

Wolosky, Shira. “The Lyric, History, and the Advant-Garde: Theorizing Paul Celan.”

Poetics Today 22:3 (2003): (651-668). JSTOR. Web. 30 March, 2011.