Poetry Friday: Poetry Comics
Graphic novels are all the rage these days, especially for young adult readers, but what about a graphic anthology of poetry? That’s what Poetry Comics: An Animated Anthology by Dave Morice purports to be. I found this book in the young adult graphic novel section of the downtown branch of my local library. It contains such classic English poems as Wordsworth’s “I Wandered as a Lonely Cloud” and Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” as well as other more modern classics, so to speak, like an excerpt from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and a poem by Langston Hughes. The erstwhile comics that go with the poems vary greatly in style and quality. There’s a rather surreal rendering of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” that I found bizarre. However, the sequence envisioning Walt Whitman as a poetic superhero whipping off his jacket to expose his W-emblazoned costume à la Superman seemed exceedingly apt.
Using comics and cartoons to visually interpret these canonical English poems seems to me to be an exercise in creative engagement with work that has been dulled with overuse in the language arts classroom. I applaud Morice’s efforts in bringing to these poems some fresh insights via the visual medium. Morice ends his book with an appendix explaining how comics are created with step-by-step instructions. What a great assignment to give to a bored high school English class! Don’t doodle while the instructor drones on about Shakespeare, doodle the poem instead and see what comes out. The kind of interactive engagement that drawing the poem takes will make the poem memorable to the student for the rest of his or her life.
This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Laura Salas – head on over!
October 16th, 2009 at 5:28 am
Wow, interesting! Thanks for letting us know about this.
October 16th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
This one sounds fantastic. I like the idea of mixing up genres… I’ll try to get hold of a copy soon.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
I really am not too sure that I like this idea. I accept that much modern poetry often doesn’t strke a chord with modern children, but to replace language with images surely means you that you have given up in trying to awaken an interest in learning about how rich and expressive language can be.
Encouraging kids toillustrate poems seems like an excellent idea, but giving them comic interpretations of a poem seems, well, comical.
October 23rd, 2009 at 4:28 am
I’m interested to see this. In a way, I want the words to provide the images. But I love poems written in response to images, so why not the reverse? I’ve just put it on interlibrary loan–thanks.
October 23rd, 2009 at 7:27 am
Hi Michael, I take your point! But it’s not all modern poetry here that Morice tackles, but early modern stuff (17th century) and later — he does 19th century Dickinson and Whitman, for example. I think the older poems are, the more opaque they are to students. I’ve taught poetry as an English teacher and a creative writing teacher and I often find with students that there are two ways to derive pleasure from poetry — some get it from critical reading (finding out what the poem means through its language and the cultural context it was written in) and others through creative engagement of some sort. I think Morice has taken the creative approach; it’s not always successful, admittedly, but as I said in my post, I applaud this effort for what it can do to make poetry come alive in the classroom.