A Poeticomic Link

This site has some talk about poem-comics and an example:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/dispatches/dispatches.feature.html?id=179224

Erraticism

Our website, Erratic Poeticomic, dropped today.

It has me thinking tonight about the word "erratic," how it's topically come to mean dangerously unpredictable, how it's typically negative. And, yes, erratic comes from errare, to stray, to err. It connects for me to essai (essay); over in nonfiction, we think of the essay as an attempt. We try to try (to try) something new, to diverge wildly, to wander-err, hoping, of course, that our divergences and errances describe a meaningful orbit around a theme-sun.

I, for one, fail often.

I stumble down the incorrect of two roads. With a different sentence structure, I flail. I make what Dinty Moore calls glorious messes.

To me, our erraticism on this website has been that kind of mess. It's a glorious attempt.

Let me put it another way. I like to mix all the food on my plate. Sometimes ketchup mixes with green bean. OK. Sometimes it's fruit with meat. Not great. But sometimes the combination works out (potato with tomato).

I think Brett, Lydia, and I heaped our work into a delicious casserole. It could use a different spice here or there and some more baking, but this time three cooks in the kitchen was not too many. In some ways, we attempted something not one of us had a solid grasp of. What each of us added, though, brought our project more clearly into focus. We were trying. To have fun. To think about poetry carefully. To joke glibly about anaphora. To see where a new idea might bring us.

So, I want our "erratic" to mean "wandering," "trying."

And trying it was: the lighting in the CSC lab does not make one happy to be considering the lighting in the CSC lab. I have blisters on my fingers. . .from clicking. Today, I saw a font and, still worried about the clarity of emotion in my Applebee's poem, thought pensively, "Oh, could that indicate pensive?"

Ultimately, this project was trying because it was different. I'm a results-driven learner, and dreamweaver, comiclife, and all of our rhetorical inspirations required something new from me: patience. I think I've succeeded (with the group and individually) in learning these unfamiliar programs, but I want to be honest about my limitations. I'm still not much with a mouse. I still reach for the artistic gimmick (be it in image or word). My attempts at revision still resemble the quick fix more than the full detailing.

I cringe when I'm thinking hard. Sometimes, I think I need to cringe a bit harder.

But I would like to echo Lydia in that this project required a certain single-mindedness, a certain irrationality. When, last Wednesday, I was laying on the floor on top of Ashley Good posing as a dead man for Lydia's comic. . .When I felt volcanic stomach pains after my second consecutive supper at Applebee's (usually relatively reliable if you stay away from the profane nachos). . .When I begged over and over to illustrate the three of us with fire shooting out of our heads, I had to wonder if I was pushing it a bit far (or even in the wrong direction).

But we had good, level heads about things. We knew when to be crazy (we started calling that "wazy" for some reason having to do with anticipatory political correctness) and when to be moderate. And during our fast-talking, computer-cursing, Avalanche-pizza-eating moments of malaise, one or another of us perked up (perhaps naively) with a "this'll be great. It'll be great. This'll link to that. Then we'll have some stuff there. And it'll be great."

If I make it sound like we lacked a blue-print, I'm doing a disservice to Lydia (endlessly energetic) and Brett (tenaciously reassuring). From the beginning we had this "ic" trope. We needed to encompass poetic, comic, rhetoric, generic, and serio-ludic. We ended up throwing in filmic, too. With that loose, but catalyt(ic) plan, we converted idea to image and the br(ic)ks began falling into place.

Dave Grover and Rob Strong should be commended for their assistance before it gets too late. Rob changed an article about Saddam Hussein into an article about Nicole Kidman for me for my comic poem. Such a large transition was only matched by the way Dave changed our anxiety about publishing the site into triumph with a few deft key strokes. I owe him a cherry limeade. From Son(ic).

Another friend who helped me with this project was Virginia Woolf. Now, I don't think she'd be too impressed. She tended to be suspicious of the plot-driven and, as much as I like to imagine the epic resonance of my Applebee's trilogy, I'm not sure it explores fully the inner life of the mind. The inner life of a riblet, maybe. Still, V. Woolf was seriously striving for genre-mixing in her new albums.

She said, "I think there ought to be a scrambling together of mediums now. The old are too rigid; but then one must have a terrific technique to explode the old forms and make a new one, to say nothing of a lump of fire in one's brain, or the new form is merely a pose."

I had this in mind during the re-composition of my poem and the construction of our site. I'm not ready to say I had a terrific technique. And we may not have exploded the old form as much as we have jazzed it up. But we're closer to seeing how we might think about a visual poetics; it won't be a classic concentration-esque illustration of the words. It will be associative, contrapuntal, undecidable. Working within such a poetic, we might understand each image as a line. We might create image sonnets or sestinas, constricting ourselves to bring focus on the form. We might consider the place of the lyric-I when that I seems to stare at the audience.

We might keep some embers going in our brains.



The fourth poem titled "At an Applebee's in Greenfield, Mass." that I "wrote" consisted of the lyrics to the Electric Light Orchestra song "Strange Magic." In some ways this was a joke, in some ways not. I always think of it as the archetypal Applebee's song, with its synthesized surreality. It occurs to me, though, that it could play in the Slimeball Bowl-A-Rama as a haunting soundtrack, or in The China Diner as a muted underscoring of spare-ribbed, falsetto depressiveness. So I want to end with it in a last gesture of erratic magic. Goodnight.

OMG

Brett, I love your post and agree that we have really created something (kind of) new (there's a presentation on poetry comics at AWP this year!). I wonder what it is. I love both forms of my poem; I wouldn't want to trash (see dumpster) one for the other, and I also love reading it aloud, which is something we did not do (its ok--we did plenty) on our site.

The link to our website is now working (to the right--subway map: careful of the yellow line).

I'm sitting watching over my students as they take an exam (that I'm sure is not as fun as our project, definitely not collaborative, and also only takes two hours) and I can't help clicking around on our site, though I should be working on other things by now. I keep clicking 1. because I am honestly quite proud, and 2. because I still want to tinker, which I can't right now. I'm exhausted from this project, but I'll miss it. We all hung in there and worked well together, and I see things differently now. Dave mentioned this phenomenon on our site; I'm noticing the visual much more than I have in a long time.



As a kid, I used to paint with my mother in her studio. When I got older, I would spend whole weekends down there alone, trying to get a painting just right. It was excruciating--sometimes thrilling--but mostly excruciating. O could never create something new. I reproduced photographs, still lifes, horrible portraits. My mother paints abstracts and creates surreal collages. I was always amazed at her ability to just let the paint go, wander around the page, and see what emerged. I could never do it like that; I needed a plan, a vision. Still, I liked the feel of the brush in my hand. I liked trying out the colors, blending them until they looked the way I wanted them to. Mainly, I think I liked the obsession. I liked locking myself away for hours on end and creating. And then I'd walk outside and notice colors I hadn't seen before, shapes of trees I'd never noticed. everything would seem sharper.



So I will miss that brand of obsession, that I found again in this project: communicating in visuals, seeing the world in shapes and colors instead of words (my other obsession!)

Last day

So I'm sitting in the computer lab on the eve of the project's due date, and I'm wondering just what it is I've accomplished over these last several weeks.

I think about all the Spinuzzi, Gee, Circ, and Vielstemmig I turned to for inspiration and direction, but none of them seem to really capture what I have done, nor what we as a group have done. In the end, I am left with a number of snippits of text that speak to and with our project and my part in it, but a project that in no way comes from any one or two of these texts. It has become its own thing, whatever that might mean.

"Thus, genre is formed by the meeting of history - the past genres from which the present genre evolved - and addressivity - the changes language users make in response to events" (Spinuzzi 297).

Have we created a genre? I'm sure I can't say, but I can say we have created something new out of something old, something multivocal out of something thought to have fewer forms of expression. Poems are thought to have two distinct modes of expression - the text can be read or spoken aloud. We have added a distinct, rather unconventional third layer. This third layer becomes even more interesting when different styles from different artists are put next to each other; just as different poets use text in different ways, now their originality has an additional outlet, and the end result is something, I believe, even more representative of the unique perspective of the poeist.

"If we (finally) journey away from the linear norm of essayist prose, [...] where do we go" (Circ 114)?

Let's revisit the images I posted earlier. In order to fit the comic genre we are working within, my images had to become cells on a page. How does this change things? How do I structure text to fit within this box system instead of the typical linear format?

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My answers to these questions came as the work progressed rather than as a part of some kind of design or pre-fabricated plan. In doing "what seemed right" what I found was that I often broke lines in different places than I did in the linear form, and sometimes I repeated key words at the end of one cell and the beginning of the next. Sometimes I felt I just needed the word to be in two places at once. Also, spoken text now came in "speech bubbles" instead of the usual quotation marks. I can't say I know exactly what all this accomplishes, but it sure was fun to create, and I think it makes for a much more powerful reading experience.

Serio-ludic, as I understand it, refers to a balance between work and play. If we as a group did nothing else, I think we managed to walk this line well. Considering the massive amount of work involved in the project, I think it is play and play alone that got us through. If it wasn't fun, it's likely I (or perhaps all of us) would have ended up looking very much like one of the dead people in Lydia's poeticomic (My severed head exists in the comic, by the way - and it links to something if you can find it.)

To close, I think I would like to quote a bit from the Vielstimmig piece:

"Multiple authorship still implies an Author: shifting ideas about coherence still imply coherence; changing media for writing still imply writing" (Vielstimmig 94).

After spending so much time on this project; after seeing something old of mine become something new, and investing such a large amount of time not only in my own words and images, but in the words and associated images of all those involved in this project, the idea that multiple authors somehow become an Author with a capital "A" makes perfect sense to me. My own work has been so greatly influenced by those I worked with that I can hardly claim sole ownership of it anymore. As distinct as each style is, both textually and visually, each seems to be part of a larger coherent whole, and while this kind of writing is certainly new and different, it is still writing. This, I believe, is what collaboration is supposed to produce.

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Works Cited

Sirc, Geoffrey. "Box Logic." Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Ed. Anne Wysocki, et al. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2004. 111-146.

Spinuzzi, Clay. "Pseudotransactionality, Activity Theory, and Professional Writing Instruction." Teaching Communication Quarterly 5.3 (1996): 295-308.

Vielstimmig, Myka. "Petals on a Wet Black Bough: Textuality, Collaboration, and the New Essay." Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Ed. Cynthia Selfe. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2000. 89-114.

Thaoughts on our project

So, after spending quite a bit of time as a group Friday putting together some of the webpages for our site and deciding how they ought to link together, and how to represent our table of contents visually (Dave has a picture of a table we were going to use, I think...post it Dave), I spent much of the weekend working with comic images for my particular poem.

For fun, here is a trailer for the movie that inspired this poem, originally. Click here to view
I don't know if I ever saw the whole movie, or just the trailer. My poem strays far from the original plot line and is more of a conglomeration of various B-slasher films I remember from my childhood. Mainly, even as a child, I was obsessed with the title of the film. How beautifully poetic is that title? Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-A-Rama. Some disgruntled poet thought of that title, I'm sure. As well as Hell-Bent Hookers, though I suspect I made that up (or my father did). I did find a myspace page titled hell-bent hooker.

So, anyone wondering why these are my childhood memories? Good question. Well, I bonded with my father frequently over B horror films (that, yes, did feature many scantily clad women, so there may have been some appeal there for him beyond the humor). We laughed together at these films before everyone was laughing at Evil Dead 2 [Hell, we laughed at the original Evil Dead].Bruce Campbell did star in this version, but the campiness was not overplayed, though still funny. The second Evil Dead is virtually the same plot, but the campiness is played up for obvious comic effect.

My thoughts on the project thus far:

• What if I had chosen a more lyric poem rather than a straight, albeit poetic, narrative? I wonder if this would have been easier to turn into a comic form visually, because I could take more liberties with the visuals I choose to associate with the text? Would it seem more like a poem?
• My narrative poem is a poem in my mind partly because of the attention I pay to line and stanza breaks, which is changed (not lost per se) within the comic book representation. Of course, I also hold that the language itself distinguishes it as well as the visuals. So in creating a narrative comic-poem, am I opening up the what is a prose poem discussion? Dave's poem series is also quite narrative, but more personal than mine, and Brett's is the most associative and personal. We should discuss how all this has been effecting our visual-making process.
  
• We plan to interpret a more lyric poem as a central motif within our site as well. I wonder how this will differ?
• What are we creating with this site?
  

Drafting Drafting Drafting

While the poem I have chosen to use in this project contains a number of personal experiences, I have decided to stay away from images of myself in my composition. I may use my own image at some point, but for now, I am finding other images more interesting and representative of the thoughts that come to mind when I read the text. I can't explain this feeling at the moment, so I'll think about it later, if at all.

The poem I have chosen is called "The Green Light" and I wrote it in response to an assignment I was given in an undergraduate creative writing course a few years ago. I haven't touched it since that time (Spring '05, I believe) but there are a few things about it that make it something I might want to represent visually.

First, it's structured in numbered sections, giving me the opportunity to present the reader with click-able options, allowing the poem to be read in a number of different ways - ordered, random, or something in between.

Also, there are a number of different "scenes" in this piece, and I plan to use these scenes to change my presentation, or at least I think I am going to attempt to do this. It's all a drafting process at this point. The images I post below will likely be presented in the final product one at a time, and the reader will have to touch each image to get to the next, or at least that's how I see it at this point.

But enough rambling. On to the poetry itself. First, here's the first section of the poem in text form, as I originally wrote it back in '05. Consider this small piece of the poem to be a kind of preview of a draft of an unfinished, incomplete, still-in-process, fluid, malleable, flexible work-in-progress. Is that non-committal enough?

The Green Light

1.

Sitting in a booth reading
Gatsby over bad Chinese food.
Carraway interrupted by the hiss
of a desperate single mother.
Sit down. Shut up. Eat.
Anger floats
on the aroma of heat-lamp Szechuan.
Light as steam, it
spreads to every corner.




And here is what it looks like in its present form:

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Now that I have taken a shot at turning a poem (or a piece of one, at least) into something more visual, I have to ask myself how this changes things. How does the combination of text and visual affect the ideas and experiences being discussed? Does it add to the poem, take away from it, or simply change it into something completely different? I'm going to think these things over and do a little reading. I'll have some thoughts later.

Initial Experimentation

In taking on this project, which was not originally of my creation, I am confronted with the fact that I have no idea whatsoever what my particular brand of poetry might look like in this new visual form. I simply never thought of presenting it this way. In an effort to make myself more comfortable with the concept, I began playing with images and image editing software. I thought maybe something might strike me as representative of a style I could call my own. Here are a few of my early attempts:





I don't know if any of these rank as poeticomical, but since I think we are probably inventing the word, perhaps it is whatever we say it is.

creating poeticomics

I don't want to spoil the final site Dave and I are creating, but here is one potential comic page that will be linkable in our site. This is from lines 15-20 of the poem I am comicifying. The question is: will I be able to tell it is a poem anymore, or will it become entirely a comic? I'll see as I move along. I need to get onto adobe photoshop to fix up some other potential pages (maybe this one too). I'd love feedback and suggestions on this bit of our project and on our idea as a whole. See Dave's blog and our wiki proposal.

I know it is gruesome...you kind of need to read the whole poem...and you will!

Lydia McDermott, my good ole poetry friend, and I have started a project to turn a few of our poems into an interactive, hypertexty comic-book website, complete with pertinent scholarship from the good ole field of visual rhetoric. We're learning Dreamweaver, a program of website generation, and scouting locations for complementary videos/photo-essays.




I'll be writing a handful of posts to log our progress and to share ideas with the class and a wider audience (Rob Strong).

Yesterday, I was helped by three separate, incredibly eager employees of Ohio University (not counting my GAship-toting, wonderful fiancee, Megan, who brought me a bag of pretzels while I watched Hardball). First, I reaped (rept sounds better here) the benefits of the Shangri-La that is the Faculty Commons.

Pounding free coffee and beginning to shake, with excitement over the project of course, I sought the services of one Mike Roy, whom I'd once seen spend over an hour teaching an interior design professor a program on one of the 58-inch screens in what is truly God's library.


(Before I go overboard with OU love, I have to include my disdain for a particular salary-sucker in the registrar's office who continually points out the error of my bureaucracy-bypassing ways without glancing up from her game of Minesweeper. She is NO Mike Roy).

So, Mr. Roy navigated me through the OU website in search of a tutorial for aforementioned Dreamweaver. My roommate Dave had suggested that such tutorials were so badly attended by the intellectually-curious student body that the administration had begun offering custom, individual training.

Boon!

While we were searching (and finding), Barb Duncan, formerly of the English department, brought us Nestle's Crunches. I felt like Seinfeld in First Class while all the Elaines toiled in the 80 degree heat of Coach library.

"More anything?" "More everything!"

Eventually, Mike found me the correct course, and my webship set sail.

Later, I would be helped by a zealous reference librarian who instructed me in the Byzantine art of Boolean searches. He was wearing the same yellow IZod polo I sport in late Augusts, and he had my cowlick. This doppeldaver was emblematic of every reference librarian with whom I've ever come in contact (comparable even to the incomparable Lorraine Wochna, whose very name has become synecdochic for zest).

After getting what I'd wanted from the man, I attempted to scurry three or four times, only to be given one more delightful hint about archives and microfiche. Trained trouble-shooters, reference librarians lust for the chase of a challenge; having shot the intellectual buck, they bludgeon it with "one more thing."

But neither Mike nor Phillip was the real star of the day. That honor goes to Sarah in the CSC lab (and her imaginary friend, Garrick, but we'll get to that). To make a protracted story petite, said Sarah somehow moved two meetings she had in order to properly instruct us in the ways of Dreamweaver. She set us up in a private lab, gave us Kit Kats (my headache today is thanks to such repeated generosities), and briefly, before we objected, wrote us into her will.

Now, Dreamweaver is a $150 program, and the University has limited licenses to offer Her students; but Sarah basically gave us unlimited access to the ten-hour tutorial (Lydia and I brilliantly shortcutted through about a third of it in an hour or so).

This computer opera is hosted by a man I'm deeply in love with--Garrick Chow.


I've strained my Roget's seeking synonyms for "dulcet" to describe Garrick's voice. Honeyed. Euphonious. Golden. Even Dream-weaving. He let me into his web-designing life, sharing his personal way of arranging folders, his easy sense of cyber-humor, his almost maniacal love of high-end teapots.

Oh Garrick, take away my worries of today.
And leave tomorrow be-hi-ind.

In an hour, Lydia and I have another rendezvous with Garrick (sigh), followed by meetings at both Rollerbowl and our local neighborhood Applebee's.

My next post may shed light on such things and will not spare the details of my Mesquite Grilled Chicken Supreme Pepper Jack Nachos Con Carne Deluxe, hold the onions, and how they relate to Gunther Kress and Scott McCloud.

I look forward to seeing you again with my text.