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Everything Is the Same Thing
May 24, 2007

I'll be brief because I feel like my brain might explode, but I've been reading a lot of comics lately--things by Jeffrey Brown, Peter Kuper, and Anders Nilson--and thinking about how similar arty comics are to poetry. 

It's really the same idea: both forms use icons to suggest larger contexts.  If you want to put a bookshelf in a comic, you don't draw every book, you just draw a couple of rectangles and then make a wavy line to suggest the rest of the books.  In a poem, you don't tell the whole story, describe the whole scene, you just use a few words, the icons of the scene, story, or feeling, to suggest it. 

So, I was very pleased to see this, a series of Web-only features commissioned by the Poetry Foundation in which they're asking well-known graphic novelists, such as Jeffrey Brown, in this case,  to make comics out of poems.  There's nothing new under the sun.

Posted by Craig Morgan Teicher on May 24, 2007 | Comments (1)