Close Reading a Visual Poem and Two Poetry Comics
by Gabrielle Bates | Editorial Assistant
There are some fabulous interviews out there with poetry comic artists (Iâm a big fan of this roundtable over at the Rumpus), and for those in search of a preliminary orientation to comics poetry in general, Alexander Rothmanâs manifesto offers some helpful arguments. However, when I cast my line out for close readings of contemporary works of visual poetry and poetry comics, I reel in much less than Iâd like. This being the case, Iâm grateful for the opportunity to think aloud about a few of the dazzling works of visual poetry and poetry comics published in the Winter and Spring 2018 issue of Poetry Northwest. My love for these pieces increases the longer I stare at them, think through their arguments, and wrestle with their choices. I wish I had the time and space to write an essay on the work of all ten artists, but as it is, what follows is a brief overview and rumination on three.
These three pieces come from artists whose work Iâve been following for a while now, and whose art and ideas have had profound effects on my own life as a poetry comic artist. I was drawn to these artists, in part, because I was interested in how these new works fit in the context of their previous work. They also, in the order Iâve imposed on them here, hint at a continuum (between poetry and comics), beginning with Catherine Bresnerâs text-forward âAmerican Sentence,” which looks more like a poem than a traditional comic; followed by Colleen Louise Barryâs âBye,â whose surreal visual and textual elements blend and juxtapose into mysterious wholes; and ending with Bianca Stoneâs âPossible Pig / Breakfast,â a character-forward piece with panels, which looks a lot more like a comic than a traditional poem. My hope, with this sample and this order, is to hint at the varied and expansive quality of the poetry comics mode at large.
Although youâll find excerpts here, I encourage you to pick up a copy of the issue and see for yourself the full range of these and other artistsâ hybrid visual-and-textual work. When viewed together in the magazine, certain shared preoccupations and influences make themselves known, some of which will be discussed here. Many take up the exhausting and perplexing relationship of humans to other humans, and several either directly or obliquely reference the last U.S. presidential election. A number are in conversation with Gertrude Stein. There is a recurring obsession with the poetic lineâas a defining unit of poetic language, yes, but also as object, barrier, directive, backdrop, un-language. Most exciting to me, perhaps, we see artists willing to take risks and experiment, to push themselves in new directions.
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 â[A] sentence,â says Gertrude Stein, âshould force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it.â Almost a century later, Louise GlĂŒck pens, âContemporary literature is… a literature of the self examining its responses.â If there is truth in both claims, and I think there is, then Catherine Bresnerâs âAmerican Sentenceâ holds a mirror to the mirrors that define our current moment in American poetry.
The violence and meta-cognitive properties Stein attributes to a good sentence when she says it âshould force itself upon youâ and âmake you know yourself knowing itâ play a crucial role in Bresnerâs visual poem, lending a central tension that both propels the reader forward and bids them tread with care through the architecture of lines, dots, and language on the page. In other words: these are good, forceful sentences.
But they are more than that. Minimalist as blueprints, the sentence diagramsâ shapely notations evoke the etymological roots of âstanzaâ as âroomââreminding us, even while abstracting language to its orders and parts of speech, that poetry is something we navigate as a body navigates a physical structure. We are moved from room to room, vulnerable to what the creator has in store. To me, the structure of a poem has a lot in common with that of a haunted house, and Catherine Bresnerâs  hand-written, hand-drawn diagrams encourage us to see âAmerican Sentenceâ as a haunted house in its early stages of construction. There is an aura of incipiency here. This is a preliminary blueprint, before the structureâs plan has been digitized and finalized, before it has actually been built.
The occasion of âAmerican Sentenceâ is a Tuesday night. The female speaker sits down to dinner with a menacing man, and the television is on. As the election results come in, the speaker directs a statement of observation at her white male counterpart (âI can see your cavitiesâ) and then asks, in the next diagram, âAre you looking at my cavities tooâ? The reflexive swerve toward the self feelsâin light of GlĂŒckâs statementâutterly contemporary, utterly American, a natural progression for a mind examining its articulations as theyâre articulated.
Sentence diagramming, in general, recalls a time of grammar instruction. In a poem written in English aboutâamong other thingsâthe last presidential election in the United States, I canât help but see connections between this poemâs evocations of âlearning proper Englishâ and the rhetorical treatment of immigrants and refugees during and after that campaign. Perhaps, in this light, the sentence diagram form is indicative of a core impulse: the poetâa white-presenting English speakerâwanting to make herself know herself in the wake of an election where 52% of white women cast their votes for Trump, a candidate for whom, due to the poemâs overall air of menace and toxic masculinity, we can assume the speaker did not endorse. It makes sense that at such a time, this particular speaker would look in the mirror and see the enemy, that she would examine her response to herself as such, and that the haunted house she sketched would be built in her image.
Iâve long admired Catherine Bresner for her sharp critiques of power and the formal experimentation she employs to do so. Whether sheâs turning her eye to the physical and psychological effects of living in a culture of violence against women in her digital collage poetry comic âJanuary 2ndâ or to dismantling white supremacist ideas in her embellished erasure âBond Voyage,â this poet is not afraid to take to task the powers that be. Furthermore, I donât think Iâve ever seen her work in the same medium twice. Pen-and-ink drawing, glossy magazine collage, erasure, sentence diagramming ââAmerican Sentenceâ is only the most recent in what is sure to continue to be a deliciously varied career.
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In the poetry comic âByeâ (available in its entirety online), pattern and repetition serve as the scaffolding through which Colleen Louise Barry drapes and weaves her trippy surrealism. Cyclopic eyesâscattered like fried eggs on the ground, stuck heavy-lidded onto flower potsâreappear across panels, as do flowers and disembodied arms. Textual repetition also plays an important role, reaching a crescendo in the pieceâs final panel, which reads âPEOPLEâ PEOPLEâ PEOPLEââ accompanied by the image of a wilting cyclops orchid, and below that, âNOTHING WAS ENOUGH,â repeated twice: once floating freely, once contained by a bubble. Â
If Catherine Bresnerâs sentence diagrams are blueprints for a haunted house, Colleen Louise Barryâs poetry comic is the first-person footage of a body tripping through it. We push with the protagonist through a wall of flowers, face the mouth of a tunnel, experience a barrage of hallucinatory stimuli as we walk forward, then collapse with our arm in the tunnel, unable to go any further. This poetry comic may be, in many ways, about feeling exhausted, but itâs also manic. Compositionally, the panels are artfully busy, layering panels, landscapes, and patterns. Barry sends text scooting up walls and around corners, pulls it from the mouth of mouthless and mysterious sources: roses, a watch, a hooded guru. Reading this poetry comic, we become its âpeople inside the garden.â
In her work, Barry often blurs boundariesânot just between text and imageâbut between reality and dream, inner and outer, human and inhuman, we and I. The only noticeable difference, in fact, between âByeâ and other work of Barryâs Iâve had the pleasure to see is in its lack of color. The unshaded black-and-white drawings in âByeâ have a flattening and equalizing effect, allowing for the intentional affront of this comicâs surreal world. While the movement is of its images palpable, the scenery is rendered in two dimensions, and this kind of sensory contradiction keeps readers on their toes. Perhaps because Iâm used to seeing Barryâs work in color, the unshaded black-and-white quality also calls to my mind a coloring book. Itâs as if, when the speaker collapses onto the tracks in the final panel, theyâre unable to get up and color in all that theyâve drawn. I can almost hear them saying, exhausted, âYou do it.â
The comicâs title, enclosed in quotation marks in the opening panel, frames the comic as a departure, a journey. That journey is short and yet, chock-full of stimuli, it drains its hero into a slump. Reading this comic again and again gave me much the same feeling as watching a gif: the circularity of the experience works in tandem with the comicâs strategy of overstimulation and its tone of fatigue, evokingâalong with the visual and textual repetitionsâyet another thrilling and unbearable endlessness.
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The work of Bianca Stoneâpublished in such places as Poetry and in her book Poetry Comics from the Book of Hoursâintroduced many of us to the concept of poetry comics for the first time. Here, her four-panel, single-page comic âPossible Pig / Breakfastâ both continues and departs significantly from her previous work. Where once her palette was dark, her images smeared with black ink, populated with human nudes and exploding heads against precarious and debaucherous backdrops, we find here muted pastel colors, neat lines, clean domestic settings, and a marked absence of the human.
I typically steer away from using autobiography as a lens, but it seems significant that in the time between creating Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours and this new work, the artist has become a mother. While there is no mention of motherhood in âPossible Pig / Breakfastâ nor the presence of any form of child, there are many ways in which this poetry comic calls to mind traditions of childrenâs literature: animals acting like humans, for example, and clear representations of positive and negative behavior.
Whenever I give talks on poetry comics at schools, I typically use childrenâs literature as a launching off point for discussing the different ways in which visual and textual modes can interact. On the childrenâs literature side of the spectrum, the visual and the textual often support or illustrate each other, while on the poetry comic side of the spectrum, the visual and the textual often contrast, juxtapose, spar. Overall, Stoneâs new work feels more like a hybrid of traditional comic and childrenâs literature than her previous work; however, there are still surprising movements and poetic language, and the concerns (American politics, emotional perspective) are certainly adult.
The two main characters and speakers of âPossible Pig / Breakfastâ are a pig and a large bird. Their presence at the breakfast table tells us that they live together, and the comicâs formal qualities, the characters and their setting, as well as their conversation all present us with many oppositional dichotomies clearly divvied into bad and good:
Bad, as represented by the bird |
Good, as represented by the pig |
Digital Media (laptop) |
Physical Media (book) |
Breaking News (Trump) |
Literature (poetry) |
Angsty Pessimism |
Serene Optimism |
Seeing |
Listening |
Black-and-White |
Color |
The oppositional dichotomy Iâm most intrigued by in this comic is the one I see as its least intuitive: seeing < listening. âClose your eyes and listen hard,â the optimistic, poetry-reading pig says, when the smoking bird scoffs at the idea that âecstasy is so near.â Seeing, the pig argues, separates or distracts from ecstasy. Iâm reminded of the open eyes splattered across Colleen Louise Barryâs poetry comic âBye,â forced to stare at the bizarre and overwhelming world until they droop. An excess of visual exposure, both of these poetry comics seem to say, is harmful, antithetical to true joy. I find it fascinating to see these artists critiquing words and images, their own methods of meaning-making. In fact, all three artistsâCatherine Bresner, Colleen Louise Barry, and Bianca Stoneâdisplay in these pieces a distrust of the vehiclesânamely, language, images, and the selfâon which their art depends.
Though distrust and ill ease is palpable in much of the art created over the past year, and these three pieces are no exception, this work does not leave me feeling helpless or paralyze me with negative emotion. Much to the contrary, I find myself remindedâas Bianca Stoneâs pig character saysâthat despite all there is to despair about, ecstasy exists, art can still thrill, poetry in its endlessly varied permutations retains the capacity to soothe. By tackling disgust, fear, and exhaustion with such surprising, intelligent craft, these artists have punctured me in such a way that I feel some of the disgust, fear, and exhaustion leaving my body for the first time in a long while.
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GlĂŒck, Louise. âAmerican Narcissism.â American Originality: Essays on Poetry. FSG. 2017.
Steenson, Sasha. âWith Pleasure: Gertrude Stein and the Sentence Diagram.â Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art. 2017.
Stone, Bianca. Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours. Pleiades Press. 2016.