Bianca is a poet and artist, and is the author of the chapbook Someone Else's Wedding Vows from Argos Books. She has been published in such magazines as Best American Poetry 2011, Conduit, and American Poetry Review. She is the cofounder and editor of Monk Books. Her next book, Antigonick, a new kind of comic book, and collaboration with Anne Carson, will be out in 2012 from New Directions. She lives in Brooklyn with the poet Ben Pease and their cat Commander Riker.
This is an older poetry comic I did, but I was interested in showing it because of how disparate the images are. While I try always to keep certain threads within a comic, often times the images stand utterly alone. Even the images sometimes seem to have little to do with the words they carry. But often I find in illustrating a poem, it ruins it to attempt to translate it. I’m only saying this because it might be hard at first to understand these as “comics”. They’re more poems in a kind of form-gone-awry….
When we read a poem we are also looking at a poem. When we hear it read allowed we are also constructing it visually in our minds (however imperfect that might be). But what we do not see is what also gives poetry its power. In comics this phenomenon of observing the different parts but perceiving the whole of the thing is called “closure” This is something we deal with every day. We know mentally what the whole is of things by our past experience. Which makes it even more interesting to think of closure within a poem, because our perception of the whole might vary depending on our past experiences with the parts. It becomes one of the most important and delicate tasks of the writer to know what parts to show, what to leave incomplete.
This is an older poetry comic I did, but I was interested in showing it because of how disparate the images are. While I try always to keep certain threads within a comic, often times the images stand utterly alone. Even the images sometimes seem to have little to do with the words they carry. But often I find in illustrating a poem, it ruins it to attempt to translate it. I’m only saying this because it might be hard at first to understand these as “comics”. They’re more poems in a kind of form-gone-awry….
When we read a poem we are also looking at a poem. When we hear it read allowed we are also constructing it visually in our minds (however imperfect that might be). But what we do not see is what also gives poetry its power. In comics this phenomenon of observing the different parts but perceiving the whole of the thing is called “closure” This is something we deal with every day. We know mentally what the whole is of things by our past experience. Which makes it even more interesting to think of closure within a poem, because our perception of the whole might vary depending on our past experiences with the parts. It becomes one of the most important and delicate tasks of the writer to know what parts to show, what to leave incomplete.
It’s like… beautiful. Absolutely.
i like it, but the pictures are too small!