In her article ‘Miremur Stellam: Poetry and Comics’ (Poetry Wales, vol. 50 no. 1), Chrissy
Williams remarks, ‘trying to unpack the language of comics, the language of
panel transitions and the blanks left for the reader’s mind to fill in, I began
to see more and more similarities between comics and poetry’. Me and her both.
As an undergraduate at UMass Amherst fifteen years ago two
things began in earnest for me: the serious pursuit of poetry, and the parallel
and entirely unserious pursuit of comics. The latter arrived in the form of Buttercup Festival, a means of
self-distraction-cum-self-expression which has, in the intervening years,
journeyed from the pages of UMass’s student newspaper to the pages of the PN Review via an array of other student
and independent periodicals.
I consider myself a dabbler in the world of comics, but even
dabbling in comics can throw a revealing light on the mechanics of poetry. Much
of this, to my thinking now, comes down to considerations of not just timing,
but time itself. A quick look at one of my favorite Buttercup Festival strips, will suggest what I mean. Series 2 no.
15 (have a look)
is a two-panelled strip with little action and little dialogue. The joke, if
that’s the word for it, is to suggest that the jay’s moment of poise and
freedom would, if imitated by the protagonist, end in painful, flopping
disaster.
The panel sizes matter: the first is expansive and detailed,
the second tighter and more selective. The first clearly contains more
chronological or objective time, especially if we include whatever implied
misadventure landed the protagonist so high up that tree. But both panels
represent the same amount of what I will call emotional or subjective time: the
brief, isolated moment of the second panel is as memorable as the larger, slower context painted by the first. The
untenable, hanging, beaks-up energy on which the strip ends is permanently
arriving, permanently fleeting. The moment is obliterated as soon as we turn
away. That is how sequential art plays with time, making subtle emotional
movements permanently available.
The interplay between chronological time and emotional time
– that is to say between the detail within a panel and the movement between
multiple panels – translated into poetry, becomes roughly the interplay between
line/stanza length
and line/stanza breaks. Here’s a
portion of ‘Indian Paintbrushes’, the first of my New Poetries pieces:
Now our daughter
wakes
in her chair
and watches quietly the green berries. Up in the weeds
stars
eat each other like fish.
In composing these lines and deciding on the breaks, I am
thinking entirely in terms of subjective time: the gentle isolation of our
daughter’s waking into its own one-word line; the long, comparatively rich line
in which she looks upwards at the berries and sky, watching them for a spell of
time; the way this focuses again on the exclusive fascination of noticing the
stars.
I don’t want to sound too dogmatic or mechanical about all
this. These elements of comics and poems don’t perfectly correspond, and I’ll
certainly also break lines for metrical or aural reasons. But this awareness of
how time can work in poetry – with a jagged array of line lengths playing
against a regular pattern of stanza length to suggest the way subjective time
moves within objective time – has arrived as much through my engagement with
comics as with poetry.
