The Poetry of Comics

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From the drawing board of Leland Myrick

“If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever
can warm me, I know that is poetry”

Emily Dickinson

I took part in a panel discussion at last summer’s San Diego
comic convention that started me thinking again about a subject that’s been
spinning around in my head for a while—the relationship between comics and
poetry, and whether some comics can be called poetry. It didn’t take me long,
honestly, to come to the conclusion that many comics, though they might not have
started out as poems, are in their finished forms closer to poetry than
anything else.

During the panel discussion in San Diego, I got quite a few questions from
the audience about the process I went through with my :01 graphic novel
MISSOURI BOY. I had mentioned in my introduction on the panel that each chapter
in MISSOURI BOY had begun life as a poem, none of which (except for the last
chapter) were meant at the time of their writing to be anything but poems,
poems to be put away in a drawer somewhere or possibly to be read aloud to friends
and family at a poetry reading. Much of what I’d written around that time was
about my early life in rural Missouri,
and the poems that eventually became MISSOURI BOY were written over a span of
almost ten years and were quite different in form, ranging from blank verse to
haiku. When the idea finally gelled that I would take all these disparate poems
and meld them into one coherent graphic novel, I began to think about the
process of turning poetry into comics, and in thinking about the process, I began
to feel my way toward the kind of book I wanted MISSOURI BOY to be when it was
finished. What I did NOT want was a book of illustrated poems. What I wanted
was a graphic novel that moved through time and in the end told one large story
through a bunch of little moments strung together, the little moments fairly
clear in themselves, but the larger story more indistinct as seen through the
scattered lenses of the individual chapters.

One of the most important things that happened in the
transformation from poem to comic was the loss of words. My editor, Mark Siegel
used what became an important phrase for me in the early stages of the book
when I was still struggling with keeping the language of the original poems
intact—Let the words fall away. And so I did. In my head I saw the words
falling away, floating leaves settling on the floor around my drawing table.
And when I did, the transformations occurred for me, small enchantments
twisting poetry into comics. When I told my friend Jane (who taught me more about
poetry than anyone else) about this process, she said, “Oh…don’t let the
words fall away! Let me have them.” One of the nicest compliments I’ve ever
received, and I’ll always love her for saying that.

When I finished MISSOURI BOY, I didn’t stop thinking about
the connection between poetry and comics, because the chapters still felt like
poems to me, and I began to think about the other graphic novels and comics
I’ve loved, and I began to think about which ones felt like poems to me. And a
lot of them came to my mind. And I decided that, for me, certain books are
poetry, in the same way that MISSOURI BOY is still poetry. They feel like poems
when I read them. The magic mix of the language, the arrangement of the words
on the page and the pictures conjures poetry.

The moment near the end of Dave McKean’s CAGES when the
artist and his love are talking about creativity and then walk out on the
balcony to see the city rising beneath them—that’s poetry. The moment in Taiyo
Matsumoto’s BLACK & WHITE when Kimura has a leisurely conversation with
Suzuki and then kills him, Suzuki knowing all along that he’s going to
die—that’s poetry. The moment at the end of Lark Pien’s LONG TAIL KITTY, when
Long Tail Kitty carries the bunny-chewed shoe to the sleeping woman—that’s
poetry. The moment in Keiko Nishi’s shojo manga, THE SKIN OF HER HEART, when
Lin-Lin turns down an offer of marriage from the factory chief’s son and the
rain stops. That’s poetry. And I think even if Dave McKean or Lark came up to
me and pointed a finger in my face and told me absolutely not, their books are
NOT poetry, I’d smile and nod, and they’d still be poetry in my head and in my
heart.

This all may lead one to say that I am just playing with
words. And that would be true. But, if I stretch my mind and try to come
up with a definition for poetry, I can never settle on anything that strays
very far from Miss Dickinson’s definition that I started with. Novels can be
poetry, and graphic novels can be poetry, and films can be poetry, and sometimes,
for a little while, people can be poetry. They may not be verse, the physical
manifestation of poetry that usually starts on the left side of the page and
turns back on itself. But poetry is not the same as verse. Not for me, and not
for Emily Dickinson.

[UP NEXT WEEK: GREG COOK]