Poetry and Comics / Lorraine Schein
Poetry and Comics
Lorraine Schein
Comics, one of the most American of art forms, have increasingly appeared in American poetry over the last fifty years. Yet poets have been interested in, intrigued or angered by comics, and worried about the increasing popularity of visual imagery in print material over oral traditions of poetry for a long time.
In an 1846 sonnet titled “Illustrated Books and Newspapers,” William Wordsworth wrote:
Wordsworth was responding to the greater availability of illustrated material in newspapers and magazines, due to improvements in printing processes in the 1800s. He seems alarmed in this poem that the “pictured page” would eclipse the popularity of “verse” (“the tongue and ear”) — and his prediction has generally come true.
These innovations in mass printing of images allowed newspapers to develop the comic strip. American comic strips (which later evolved into comic books) are generally thought to have started with the appearance of the 1896 strip, The Yellow Kid. The early comic books were simply reprints of newspaper strips. Eventually, though, comic books began to feature original material, foremost among them the appearance of Superman in 1938’s Action Comics. The 1940s, known as the “Golden Age” of comics, was the time when they reached the height of their popularity. But the 1950s saw the shadow cast on comics by psychologist Frederic Wertheim, who popularized the view that reading comics promoted violence, and were the heyday of opposition to them by religious and civic groups.
How does poetry relate to comics? At first glance, the two forms seem far apart.
One way is through myth. Our culture does not have many common myths—stories that everyone recognizes and knows. Fewer people today know the Greek and Roman myths than ever before. It can be argued that comics and popular culture in general now serve as our unifying myths, so it is not surprising they have increasingly begun appearing in our poetry and literature.
As Rich Kreiner says in his essay “Funnybook Lit 101” from The Education of a Comics Artist, referring to the 1963 anthology The Funnies: “Many of the book’s pieces took as their starting point the implicit significance of the funnies’ formidable popularity and daily presence in readers’ lives (‘Blondie, which appears in some twelve hundred papers throughout the world, may be read seventeen billion times in a single year.’)”2
And Kenneth Koch once remarked that one rarely cared “as much about about Hecuba as about Olive Oyl.” (The quote is from David Lehman’s introduction, Introduc. The Art of the Possible.)3
Comic book historians have written a great deal about the growing interest of intellectuals in comics in the 1940s and 1950s. But this interest was usually not favorable. As the editors of Arguing Comics say in their introduction: “Having emerged out of the anti-Stalinist left of the 1930s and 1940s, many New York intellectuals associated mass culture with either the popular front…or conformist culture....vulnerable to totalitarian propaganda and control.”4
And Rich Kreiner notes that, “In a 1952 piece, poet and essayist Delmore Schwartz gave a close reading to three issues of Classics Illustrated, the series that, in the comic book equivalent of cross-dressing, retold epics of world literature in forty-four pages of words and pictures.”5
Schwartz says in this essay, “Masterpieces as Cartoons,” “that the bottom of the pit has been reached, I think, in the cartoon books which are called Classics Illustrated, a series of picture-and-text versions of the masterpieces of literature.”6
After reading the comics version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he wrote: “ …. the fundamental question… seems to me to be: will the juvenile reader ever arrive at the point where he wants to see the original as it was intended to be, in its full actuality as a work? And the answer which suggests itself is a depressing one. If you get used to getting literature with illustrations—then you are likely to feel deprived when there are no illustrations and you have to do all the work yourself….Moreover, [it] is all too likely to make you unused if not unwilling to read books which have no pictures in them.”7
Schwartz here sees comics as somehow tainting the literacy, ability and desire of children to ever appreciate “high” art, especially poetry. But not every poet agreed with this dim view. Several years earlier, the poet E.E. Cummings had written an essay praising the strip Krazy Kat, saying “Wisdom, like love, is a spiritual gift. And Krazy happens to be extraordinarily gifted.… Krazy Kat…translates a mangled and murdering world into Peace and Good Will….”8
The attitude toward comics by poets improved from the 1960s on, with the growing acceptance of popular culture. Many late 20th and 21st Century poets have increasingly used the language and characters of comics in their work. The view held of illustrated text (and later, comics) by poets has changed since Wordsworth’s time (of course, even then there were exceptions like William Blake, as well as a long tradition of illuminated manuscripts)—from alarm to acceptance and celebration.
The Culture of Comics
Another way in which poetry and comics are similar is in the size of their audience and cultural marginality. As Andrew Arnold says in his essay “Comix Poetics”:
Culturally, at least, serious-minded comic artists have much in common with traditional poets. You could describe each the same way: an underappreciated author who spends years working on a thin volume to be published by a barely surviving independent press for a small, cultlike audience. Until recently, the difference could be measured in the level of respect accorded one over the other, at least in the United States. Comic artists, regardless of their subject matter, have traditionally hovered in the artistic hierarchy somewhere above pornographers but below children’s book authors. But that seems to be changing. There are more comic poets today than at any time before, thanks to the comic medium’s explosive growth in the last five years. Like traditional poets who work at the cutting edge of the English language, these artists create the pathways that others will follow.9
Unfortunately, the audience for poetry in this country has become more insular and smaller compared to that of comics, as evidenced by the growing attendance at recent comics conventions, compared to the small attendance at poetry readings.
The New York School and Comics in Poetry
The mostly hostile attitude by 1950s writers towards taking comics seriously began to change with the use of comics in poems and experimentation with them by the poets and artists of the New York School. They helped erase the distinction between “high” and “low” art made by earlier writers, such as Delmore Schwartz.
The New York School was a style of poetry that began around 1960. Its writers were strongly influenced by the visual arts, as many of the poets involved were friendly with and/or collaborated with the Abstract Expressionist painters and artists in New York at the time. Also, many of the poets had jobs in the art world: Frank O’ Hara and James Schuyler worked at the MOMA, and John Ashbery was a critic for Art News.
The poetry of the New York School also had an urban, humorous sensibility, and drew its material from daily life (as in O’Hara’s Lunch Poems). So it is not surprising that some of these poets incorporated the language of comics and cartoons into their work.
John Ashbery, one of the leading poets associated with the New York School, used characters from comics and cartoons in his poems “Daffy Duck In Hollywood” (told from the first-person perspective of Daffy Duck), and “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” which uses the characters from Popeye. The latter poem is interesting in its mixture of traditional form and unconventional subject matter.
What does this bring to the poem? David Herd says of Ashbery:
…the momentary, circumstantial, or situational quality of his writing, its feeling for simultaneity, is evident […] recognizing his interest in the ordinary, not the extraordinary moments of life… an idiom attentive to Ashbery’s sense of occasion…. allows one to approach the question of taste – one’s sense of occasion being very much a matter of taste – and, through that, to address the related issues of influence, camp and the mix in his poetry of high and low culture. …Ashbery’s writing is explicitly not fit, meet, felicitous, and appropriate, but vulgar, comic, impolite and ludicrous....10
The ridiculous and the sublime are joined in this poem and others that use comics. “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” is a sestina, its repeating words being “thunder,” “apartment,” “country,” “pleasant,” “scratched” and “spinach.” It follows the traditional form for a sestina, six stanzas of six lines each in the traditional pattern, except for the tercet. The usual end-words for the tercet are 5, 3, 1, but Ashbery ends his sestina in a slightly different pattern of 1, 5, and 3 end-words.
The title and subject matter of this poem, though, are anything but traditional. Its title does not relate to the characters of the poem, but to its setting: the country, making it a pastoral poem. The poem is a spoof on and reversal of the pastoral poem, defined as “…a poem about shepherds and other herdsmen or in praise of such a life as they lead… Not seldom the pastoral is an elegy… An idyl, another name for the pastoral, means more specifically a short poem offering a happy picture of country life.”11 But the country life shown here is more disturbed and dark than happy.
The title is a surreal linking of the general category words “farm implements,” which sound like they came from an old catalog, to the specific, unusual vegetable name, “rutabagas.” The title has nothing to do with the characters in the poem—it is an ironic commentary on the pastoral setting of the poem.
Ashbery’s art history background shows in the rest of his poem’s title: “in a Landscape.” This is a satiric reference to the many pastoral paintings that use this in their title, and show farm workers or peasants laboring in a field or other nature scenes.
This is what we see in the poem, except the farm workers are characters from the comic strip Popeye, and they are definitely not laboring.
The poem opens with a casting of the main character of the poem, Popeye, as a mythological figure: “Popeye sits in thunder, unthought of.”12 Popeye is envisioned as a thunder god here, possibly Zeus or Thor (another mythological god who became a character in Marvel comics). But like the gods, he is often absent or invisible to mortals, though he knows all.
Here, Popeye’s absence is from the poem we are reading and from usual poetic consciousness, since he is a comics character, so he is “unthought of.” He only appears, again accompanied by thunder, in the last lines of the poem: “Minute at first, the thunder / Soon filled the apartment”: “It was domestic thunder, […] Popeye chuckled.”
The other characters in this poem can be seen as mythological characters, too—Wimpy and Olive Oyl as minor gods, and Swee’pea as a kind of Delphic oracle or Cassandra-like being. Swee’pea can also be seen as taking the part of the foreboding chorus in a Greek play.
The mysterious, inflated language continues, contrasting with the mundane use of the comics figure of Popeye: “From that shoebox of an apartment, from livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.” Popeye, though a god, is a confined figure, in a “shoebox of an apartment.” The confined apartment space is a reference to crowded city life, versus that of the country.
This may also be why he is “unthought of”: being a comic book character, he is as confined to the past in our consciousness and to a small space in our thoughts as he is in his apartment. Yet out of this confinement emerges the freedom of the country of the imagination, unbounded by the narrow confines of everyday consciousness, represented here by the city.
It is uncertain if the characters actually are in the country in this poem: the word “apartment” occurs in every verse, and we are never told they are in a house or cottage.
Instead, we are told: “The apartment / Seemed to grow smaller.” The apartment is a shifting, magical, contradictory space. Are the characters in an apartment that is in the country?
The idea of the tangram is significant here. The tangram is an ancient Chinese moving-part puzzle, made by cutting a square into seven different geometric shapes that can be moved into many different figures. The poem is a kind of puzzle too, and resembles the tangram in structure. Its seven stanzas may echo the seven shapes of the tangram. Also, tangrams are geometric shapes made out of or drawn on a flat, one-dimensional surface, just as comics panels are printed on the flat surface of paper.
The next character we see after Popeye is mentioned is the Sea Hag. The Sea Hag is a witch who can shape-shift and enchant others—just as the landscape and characters in this poem shift and enchant.
Continuing the undermining of the poem by its title, the Sea Hag is not working—in fact, she is on vacation, “relaxing on a green couch: ‘How pleasant to spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye […].’” “En la casa de Popeye” means “in Popeye’s house,” yet it is not clear if this space is an apartment or a house in the country.
Wimpy appears next. Unlike the other characters in the comic, his language was always elevated and pompous, but here it becomes increasingly portentous and poetically lofty:
“‘M’love,’ he intercepted, ‘the plains are decked out in thunder / Today, and it shall be as you wish.’” [...] “But what if no pleasant / Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my country.”
When I googled this line, it was not surprising to find that many of the words in it showed up in lines from Wordsworth’s “The Preludes,” which is a poem that glorifies the countryside and memories of childhood. Comics characters are the happy memories of childhood in Ashbery’s poem, of course. Ashbery may also be spoofing the elevated language of the English Romantic poets in this poem.
In the third verse, Wimpy thoughtfully opens a can of spinach, in response to the Sea Hag, who “…remembered spinach / And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.” In the comic strip, Wimpy is romantically involved with the Sea Hag, who often bewitches him. That may be what is being shown here. Or perhaps Wimpy is really opening the spinach in anticipation of Popeye’s arrival, because the Sea Hag has asked for it for that reason.
Swee’pea, Popeye’s adopted baby son, arrives next, with a note pinned to his bib. I have not been able to find any reference to notes being pinned to Swee’pea’s bib. However, here Ashbery may be referring to The Yellow Kid, one of the first American comic strips. Like Swee’pea, the Yellow Kid also wore a yellow nightshirt, and his dialogue always appeared there too.
The note on Swee’pea’s bib continues with more ominous language: “‘Thunder and tears are unavailing,’ it read. ‘Henceforth shall Popeye’s apartment be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched.’” Ashbery may be suggesting here that childhood memories, represented here by the beloved characters from comics, are a confined, remembered space, just like the apartment. They may be “toxic” (as comics were thought to be to children) or “salubrious”—a sign of a healthy imagination.
Olive Oyl appears next, her skinniness described by “her long thigh.” She says Popeye is forced to leave the country “by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment….” In the comic, Popeye’s father is a duplicate image of Popeye. When they first meet, he is indifferent to Popeye, and refuses to acknowledge him as his son.
Here, though, he is actively hostile to him, and jealous of Popeye’s girlfriend, Olive Oyl. He is also jealous of spinach, which seems to be a magical substance in this poem, as in the comic. However, in the comic, spinach only increases Popeye’s strength, but here its magic effects are mysterious and unknown.
Popeye is pictured as Zeus again when Olive next says that he “heaves bolts of loving thunder / At his own astonished becoming….” Popeye is here described as a deity who is astonished at his own powers. He is about to magically appear, foreshadowing the end of the poem.
When Olive Oyl grabs Swee’pea and announces she’s taking him to the country, the Sea Hag says, “‘But you can’t do that—he hasn’t even finished his spinach’ / Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.” Like Olive Oyl, the Sea Hag is also anticipating Popeye’s appearance. She is worried that he will appear because of the abduction by Olive Oyl of Popeye’s adopted child, Swee’pea.
The appearance of Popeye is also foreshadowed by the apartment itself: “Now the apartment / succumbed to a strange new hush.” It is a silence ready to be filled. The Sea Hag continues “‘If this is all we need fear from spinach / Then I don’t mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over….’”
Alice the Goon was a monster who was enslaved by the Sea Hag, like Caliban was by Prospero. The Sea Hag’s fear of spinach shows its power again. Spinach is equated with the arrival of Popeye, and this is what happens. “Minute at first, the thunder / Soon filled the apartment.” As in the first lines of the poem, Popeye is heralded by thunder and appears as a thunder god.
The characters in this poem are like Chekhov’s three sisters: they talk about the country, but it is only Popeye in the last verse that is definitely there: “Popeye chuckled and scratched / His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.” The use of the words “dugs” and “balls” contrasts with the high-flown language in the rest of the poem.
There are several mentions of color in this poem, a reminder of the garish primary colors used in the Sunday comics. The word “Livid” in the third line’s “Livid curtain’s hue” is a word meaning black and blue, as well as reddish. Not surprisingly, because of Popeye and his spinach, green is the color most prevalent in this poem. The Sea Hag relaxes on a green couch, and later Olive Oyl mentions “…Tree-trunks and mossy foliage….” It is also the color most associated with pastoral art and writing.
“Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” is a poem of contrasts. Its use of comics helps emphasize the difference between the ridiculous and the sublime, and between fantasy and the everyday.
Illustrated Poetry or Poetic Comics?
Comics can relate to poetry in two ways: either directly through content (by use of comics imagery or characters in poems), or structurally (adding art or illustration to interpret poems, or writing poems in the form of comics panels and art, as in Kenneth Koch’s The Art of the Possible or Dave Morice’s later book, Poetry Comics).
Kenneth Koch was associated with the New York School as well. His book, The Art of the Possible, is a collection of poetry structured visually like comics. As David Lehman writes in his introduction to the book: “For Kenneth it was an article of faith that…the comic book no less than the Elizabethan sonnet or the Romantic ode, has its place in the world of seriousness and can provide the fodder or the structure, the spirit or the form of a poem. The comic book panel was like the line in poetry, a unit of composition, ‘suggesting new ways of talking about things and dividing them up’”13
But unlike the comics-style illustration of poems in books like Poetry Comics, the visual art here is minimal, limited by Koch’s drawing ability, and subservient to the words. It is closer to concrete poetry than traditional comics. As David Lehman says, “…Kenneth decided that not only could he borrow subject matter or adapt a narrative technique from comics but it might be possible to write poetry in a new form based on them. The Art of the Possible is … extraordinarily inventive in treating the comic strip as a conceptual form ‘mainly without pictures.’ Koch’s comics can work like the calligrammes of Apollinaire…or like a box chart.”14
Besides looking like a box chart, Koch’s poems can more likely be seen as directly mimicking the box style used in comics, where each panel in the rectangular box shows a drawing of another scene and/or character. Sometimes there are captions and dialogue balloons added.
Koch mimics this visual convention in his poems by putting descriptive words or bits of dialogue narrative in his box poems, instead of showing the action through illustration in panels. Since there are no drawn characters, what would be their captions in a comic book become only words filling up a square. “Deer Tendon Comics” is a good example of this. Each square has a part of a sentence or a sentence. Some squares only have one or two words written larger than the rest, for emphasis. In a comic, they might be shown by a close-up of an image or person.
Ed Park, editor of the Poetry Foundation’s “The Poem as Comic Strip” series, says, “heightened language—one possible or partial definition of poetry—isn’t the first thing one associates with comics. Yet comic book artists take into account the way words appear on a page to a degree poets will find familiar. How many lines should accompany each image? ...The ratio of printed words to blank space plays a role in whether a poem or strip succeeds.”15
Koch does this in his box poems. “Deer Tendon Comics,” like many of his poems in this book, ends with a punch line, when the reader finds out the deer tendon is probably a deer penis. These two words are emphasized by larger, contrasting type, and an exclamation point, with another one at the end of the piece. Exclamation points at the end of dialogue are another element often used in comics.
Joe Brainard was one of the second generation of New York School poets and artists, and often collaborated with Ron Padgett, Kenneth Patchen, Kenward Elmslie and others who used comics in their work.
The Nancy Book is a collection of Brainard’s art and writing using the classic comic strip character, Nancy. According to the book’s blurb, “…From 1963 to 1978 …[Brainard] created more than one hundred works of art using Nancy and sent her into an astonishing variety of spaces, all electrified and complicated by the incongruity of her presence. In The Nancy Book, Joe Brainard's Nancy traverses high art and low, the poetic and pornographic, the surreal and the absurd. Whether inserted into hypothetical situations, dispatched on erotic adventures, or seemingly rendered by the hands of artists as varied as Leonardo da Vinci, R. Crumb, Larry Rivers, and Willem de Kooning, Brainard's Nancy revels in as well as transcends her two-dimensionality.”
Brainard also wrote poems and stories about Nancy in this book, and drew his own comic strips featuring her. Some typical irreverent panels are shown here, from his “If Nancy…” series.
As well as inserting the face of Nancy into famous paintings, like Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” Brainard put her face onto the images of bodies from porn magazines. Like other artists from the New York School, Brainard experimented with comics in a playful way that focused on the contrast between high and “low” art.
Beyond the New York School—Comics in Later Poems
In The Art of the Impossible, Koch showed one way poems can relate to comics by creating his own poems using the graphic conventions of comics. Another approach is shown by Dave Morice’s 1980s book, Poetry Comics, which took well-known poems and turned them into comic strips drawn by the author.
The use of comics in poems continues through the 20th century to the present day.
Later poets who have used comics characters in their work include Nicholas Christopher, who in his book, Desperate Characters, has a poem titled “Krazy Kat.” Krazy Kat is one of the comic strips most used and written about by poets and literary critics because of its inventive language, archetypal situations and surreal landscapes.
Christopher’s poem, “Reading the Sunday Comics, Summer 1963,” is a nostalgic look at his boyhood, evoked through the ritual of reading the Sunday newspaper’s comics. He is not using comics in a surreal way in his poem, as Ashbery did in his. Christopher is using comics in his work for a more common reason: as a meditation on childhood. The sublime here is experienced through memory and comment on the past and faithful description of remembered comics characters and settings, instead of distorting them.
The poem is divided into four parts, each titled with the name of a different comic strip. Each strip is first described from the point of view of the speaker as a boy reading it in the past, with later lines showing his current adult perceptions of the characters.
The first part of the poem is “Gasoline Alley,” based on a strip that shows the perfect and perfectly boring suburb, where “Lawns and flowerbeds without weeds / set back on tree-lined streets. Everything orderly. Every surface polished.”16 The people here are white-bread too: “Smiling young men with bulging biceps / who change your flat tire / and never dirty their white coveralls. / The girl from the coffee wagon […] who leans against the soda machine / happily chewing gum. / No one having sex. / Or wanting it.”
Sex is one of the hallmarks of adulthood, of entry from adolescence into maturity. Its absence in this strip is realized to be a glaring omission by the adult Nicholas Christopher. Here he is both reminiscing in a nostalgic, fond way about his childhood view of the strip and commenting on its blandness from his adult point of view.
The “Gasoline Alley” section ends with the realization of another glaring omission in this strip: “a community of honest men / doing an honest day’s work. / No one dying.” An adult has the awareness of death, which children and the child Christopher reading this comic would not have had.
The predictable nature of story in comic strips is shown by the last line here: “Someone always telling a familiar joke in the end.” This is always happening and the joke is never new, just as the strip’s situations are always the same.
“Blondie,” the second section of the poem, begins with a wry adult view of “The harried, hysterical housewife in need of a therapist / in a world where there is no therapy.” Blondie was a former flapper and this strip originated in the 1920’s, before therapy became common.
Here, time stands still for the character and her life stays the same. “Nothing will ever change for her.” Christopher ends this part by imagining what a modern Blondie’s thoughts would be. He does not enter into the minds of the other characters in the poem: “Just once, she would like to sleep / in the nude—with someone else.” “Blondie” ends with a return to a knowing, cynical adult perspective.
“Betty and Veronica” continues the look at women characters in comic strips. As in “Blondie,” time is unchanging for the characters and they never age: Two girls “driving by a sparkling lake. […] They will never witness a crime / or enter a voting booth. / Never go to college / or work in an office / or feel their youth slip away. / Never suffer the griefs / of childbirth, illness or divorce.”
The strip is an idealized version of teenaged life. The poem continues: “For all eternity / boys in letter sweaters / will give them signet rings / and fight for the privilege / of taking them to drive-ins and proms. In a life of perpetual sunshine [...]” This is the point of view of an adult looking back, knowing that being a real teenager is not “perpetual sunshine.” But also, though we may not realize it until later, there is a sense of infinite time and possibility when we are young that is lost when we arrive at the realities of adulthood. I think that Christopher is also recognizing this feeling of timelessness and bright and endless days in “Betty and Veronica.”
“Dondi” is the last and shortest section of the poem, maybe because it was the strip Christopher liked least. It is a strip about an orphan, “passed among strangers / who live in gloomy houses.” His suitcase “always packed,” he is a “brooding orphan boy” with “wide mournful eyes” and “blue-black hair with a cowlick.” “His life is a progression / of darkening adjectives.” Christopher speculates as to how Dondi will “end up”: “forever choking back tears / cold as water cupped from deep / in the North Atlantic?”
The timelessness of comics is shown here in the use of the words “always” and “forever.” As if to emphasize this timelessness, even Dondi’s dog is perpetually unhappy: the poem acknowledges, “His dog who is also ineffably sad.” The darkness of Dondi and his dark, cold environment contrasts with the description of sunshine, laughter and light in the other strips described in this poem.
In “Blondie,” Dagwood “…is making one of his famous / sandwiches […] in the brightly lit kitchen / with the half-moon nestled in the window.” The prevalence of light is also evident in the poem’s title, “Summer, 1963”—a season of light and warmth. But 1963 was also the year President Kennedy was assassinated—perhaps Christopher used this year deliberately in his title, as it was one that contained both his idyllic childhood memories as well as a horrifying event that those who were then children will always remember.
Unlike the other strip about an orphan, Little Orphan Annie, Dondi was not as popular or successful. Maybe this was because of the obvious attempt its creator made to get the reader to sympathize with its always-unhappy character. Christopher seems to recognize this. In the section’s last line, Christopher writes, “It pained me / that I never liked him.” Here he is remembering his thoughts and realization as a child of the strip’s overly manipulative attempt to make its readers feel guilty.
Comics don’t have to be “funny,” but Dondi was too sad, especially compared with the strip Little Orphan Annie, whose title character was always cheerful and having exciting adventures.
Albert Goldbarth has also written about his memories of reading the comics as a child. His poem “Powers” from his award-winning book, Popular Culture, contrasts his memory of reading about the comics’ superheroes of his childhood with the memory of his father.
The poem opens with a listing of some of those superheroes: “Whizzer, The Top, Phantasmo… / They come back sometimes / now that my father comes back sometimes.” His father says “‘Albie…all this reading is fine. But there’s a / real world.’ […]”
The poem continues with a long list of superheroes, their powers, and enemies. The opponent his father faces is poverty—specifically, his inability to pay the rent.
Goldbarth here contrasts the “unreal” world of superheroes with that of his father in the past, alternating many lines of descriptions of the superheroes with lines about his father. The poem next pulls us into Goldbarth’s reality in the present, where he is remembering all this:
Through his death, Goldbarth’s father becomes as fictional as the superheroes the poet used to read about, enabling him to appear with them: “…from the kingdom of the impossible, he appears in their midst, […] his factory outlet jacket thrown over his shoulders. ” The “unreal” world of comics and the “real” world of his father have merged, if only for a moment.
The jacket is a sign of his father’s poverty—it is the “costume” he wears, contrasted with the amazing ones of the superheroes. Before we return to Goldbarth’s boyhood, his father appears in a scene from Goldbarth’s teenage years or possibly his present: “I’m / in pieces over some new vexation…hopeless in the drizzle, / perhaps, a flashlight clamped abobble in my mouth and trying to find whatever / damage in the mysterious shrieks and greaseways of an engine […] / or with equal befuddlement, / staring damp-eyed at the equally damaged wants and generosities / awhirr in the human heart. And: ‘Albie… / how many times / have I told you? Be patient. Never force your tools or materials. / Don’t give up.’”
“Never force your tools or materials” is a reference to the poet’s craft and making of this poem , as well as his efforts at repairing a car engine.
A return to the boyhood past, and a torrent of superhero names, costumes and weapons follows after this. The alternation of lines with comics heroes’ names and imagery with lines about his father continues after this momentary merging of subject matter.
“Powers” begins with the names of superheroes in the unreal world of comics, but ends with the memory and realization by Goldbarth of how his father became a superhero to him in the “real world.”
Current Use of Poems and Comics
Collaborations between poets and comics artists, or poets making comics themselves have continued from the days of the New York School.
In 2008, the Poetry Foundation launched “The Poem as Comic Strip” experiment. They asked graphic novelists to choose poems from their extensive archive to interpret visually. As R. Kikuo Johnson and A. E. Stallings say in their Poetry Foundation article: “The best of the daily humor strips…occupy about the same thought space as a good short poem; the terseness can resemble haiku.” Responses on their website ranged from those who praised the project as a way to popularize poetry and make it more accessible to readers, to those who felt illustrating poems was redundant, because of the imagery inherent in poetry and diminished its intrinsic value.18
Poets have increasingly used the imagery and language of comics from the end of the last century into this one. A contemporary poetry book that does so is Krypton Nights, by Bryan Dietrich, a book of poems about Superman that won the Paris Review prize in 2001.
Kum Kunyosying, in a posting on the Comix Scholars List, says about a paper given on “The Super Poem” at the 2007 San Diego Comics Con: “One of the paper’s most resonant points made a differentiation between poems that reductively use comics and superheroes as totems of low art…and a newer wave of superhero poetry that transcends the low art / high art binary. Examples of the former include Albert Goldbarth’s poem ‘Powers’….Examples of the latter include Bryan Dietrich’s Krypton Nights between comic book and poem….”19
Instead of only writing single poems using comics characters, as have the previous poets whose work I have analyzed here, Dietrich devotes a whole book to one.
Krypton Nights is divided into four parts, each told from the point of view of a different Superman character. The first part is told by Superman as Clark Kent. This section includes a crown of sonnets called “Autobiography of a Cape.” In these seven interlinked sonnets, the last line of each one provides the first line of the next. The final line of the seventh sonnet is also the opening line of the first. A crown of sonnets is usually addressed to one person or on a single theme. Here the reader is being spoken to.
The second part is titled “The Jor-El Tapes”—cleverly explained as being “Transcripts of Binary Transmissions Recorded by the Very Large Array (Socorro, NM) Originating in the Vicinity of the Supernova 1993J.” It is told from Superman’s now-dead father’s point of view. The third part is called “The Secret Diaries of Lois Lane,” and the last part is told by Superman’s confined arch enemy, “Lex Luthor’s Complaint—Letters from Arkham Asylum.”
The poems in the Lois Lane section are lighter and more humorous than those in the rest of the book. They are all 25 lines in length, in three stanzas of eight lines each, with a last line that stands alone and ends the poem.
Unlike the other poems I have looked at here, “His Maculate Erection” shows a poet using a comics character to reflect seriously on religion and sex. (John Ashbery only wrote playfully about Popeye as a god in “Farm Implements,” and in a more glancing, less extensive way.)
The title of this poem could be a takeoff on both the phrase “immaculate conception” and the Christian prayer for Holy Communion, which mentions “His mighty resurrection.” Superman is here equated with Christ and/or the Holy Spirit, but his resurrection/erection is impure (‘maculate”) because it involves sex. The poem imagines Lois writing about Superman’s sexuality and wondering about one of its possible results.
This shows Dietrich’s interest in examining and expanding the myth of a comics character. He is not using the Superman character to comment on his memories of childhood, as in the Goldbarth and Christopher poems here.
Lois describes what having sex with Superman is like in the first lines: “...like riding a perpetual bike”—because of his ability to sustain a super-lasting erection. Then she starts to wonder about his sperm, which must have super-longevity and super persistence: “Do those tiny, whipping tails ever flag? / Do they remain inside, set up shop, waiting / For my tubes to, miraculously, retie?”
Another reference to Superman as a Biblical figure follows: “If we play at soap and wandering hands, / if he christens me indiscriminately / in the shower, should we try to plug the drain?” His sperm is like the Holy Water used for baptism—Superman is like John the Baptist here, baptizing Lois.
Lois next imagines Superman’s sperm “blind and eternal” going down the drain, being recycled and winding up in the water of a suburban house, eventually impregnating an older woman, whose husband has had a vasectomy: “…how will that housewife explain?” Her husband has been “long-fixed,” like Lois, whose tubes have been tied.
The poem ends with a reference to religious myth. Pregnancy by Superman’s sperm would mean “[...] Some months from now, maybe a year, / familiar tales will be retold, all the old / fables recycled.” The old Biblical fable of the Virgin birth is compared here to what would happen if an Earth woman was impregnated by Superman in this way. Superman is at once the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. By equating Superman with Jesus, Dietrich seems to be suggesting that the story of Superman is a religious myth for our time.
Other contemporary poets besides Dietrich have also used comics in their work. Lucille Clifton wrote a series of poems called “Notes to Superman / Clark Kent.” Simon Armitage's “Kid” is about Batman and Robin, and Amiri Baraka has several radio and comic book heroes in his poems.
Gary Sullivan, a cartoonist and poet who Publishers Weekly called, "One of the two most important practitioners of an emerging form that might be called the ‘graphic poem,’” has been doing a comic strip for the journal Rain Taxi that uses poetry for its captions. He is also the founder of the Flarf movement, a sort of Dadaist movement that mixes popular culture, including comics, with random Google Internet results.
His poem in Jacket magazine, titled only by date, ‘3/2/99,’ starts: “Dear Nada, Harvey Pekar urges R. Crumb to cash in goads You like money / don’tcha? tho Crumb’s oblivious / eyes fastened on sneering Amazon Jewess in black boots / I can never have her he trembles we like to imagine [...] you’re more lovely than Cher I thought / when I first saw you […] again it’s impossible to make clear in a poem in charcoal / ochre sinew atom blue as the screen these words pop up on / pieces of web glisten….”21 Here, as in other examples I have shown, comics and poetry intersect to create innovative forms, and/or subject matter, and a new way of looking at our everyday world.
As Scott McCloud states in his book Understanding Comics: “The comics creator asks us to join in a dance of the seen and unseen. The visible and the invisible.”22 This could serve as a good definition of what poetry tries to do also.
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FOOTNOTES
1. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, eds., Arguing Comics (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), p. vii Intro.
2. Matt Dooley and Steven Heller, eds., The Education of a Comics Artist: Visual Narrative in Cartoons, Graphic Novels, and Beyond (New York, NY: Allworth Press, 2005), p. 240.
3. Kenneth Koch, The Art of the Possible (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, Kenneth Koch Literary Estate, 2004) from Intro., by David Lehman.
4. Heer and Worcester, op. cit. p. xiv.
5. Dooley and Heller, op. cit. p. 239.
6. Heer and Worcester, op. cit. p. 52.
7. Rocco Versaci, This Book Contains Graphic Language (New York and London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007), p. 56.
8. Heer and Worcester, op. cit. pp. 32, 34.
9. Andrew D. Arnold (World Literature Today, "Comix Poetics": from http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/essays/Arnold-Comix.html).
10. David Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2000), p. 22.
11. Babette Deutsch, Poetry Handbook (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 119.
12. John Ashbery, The Double Dream of Spring (New York, NY: The Ecco Press, 1981), p. 48.
13. Koch, op. cit. from Intro. by Lehman.
14. Ibid. from Intro. by Lehman.
15. ‘The Poem as Comic Strip’ #6, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html
16. Nicholas Christopher, Crossing the Equator: New and Selected Poems 1972-2004 (New York, NY: Harcourt, Inc., 2004), p.101
17. Albert Goldbarth, Popular Culture (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1990), p. 60.
18. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=181161
19. Comix-scholars@clas.ufl.edu (March 26, 2009)
20. Bryan Dietrich, Krypton Nights (Lincoln, NE: Zoo Press, 2002), p. 32.
21. http://jacketmagazine.com/12/sullivan.html
22. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 1994), p. 92.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ashbery, John. The Double Dream of Spring. New York: The Ecco Press, 1981.
Boatner, Charles. “Changes in the X-Men,” The Comics Journal, Issue 346, May 1979, pp.63-65.
Brainard, Joe. The Nancy Book. Los Angeles, CA: Siglio Press, 2008.
Christopher, Nicholas. Crossing the Equator: New and Selected Poems 1972-2004. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2004.
Deutsch, Babette. Poetry Handbook. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.
Dietrich, Bryan. Krypton Nights. Lincoln, NE: Zoo Press, 2002.
Dooley, Matt and Heller, Steven, eds. The Education of a Comics Artist: Visual Narrative in Cartoons, Graphic Novels, and Beyond. New York: Allworth Press, 2005.
Goldbarth, Albert. Popular Culture. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1990.
Heer, Jeet and Worcester, Kent, eds. Arguing Comics. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2004.
Herd, David. John Ashbery and American Poetry. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Koch, Kenneth. The Art of the Possible. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, Kenneth Koch Literary Estate, 2004.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1994.
Versaci, Rocco. This Book Contains Graphic Language. New York/London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007.
Youn, Monica “Ignatz and Other Poems,” book in progress (Paris Review 181, Summer 2007)