Beginning at the edge: teaching poetry through comic book panels and internet comment threads - Writing creative writing pedagogy

Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016

Beginning at the edge: teaching poetry through comic book panels and internet comment threads
Writing creative writing pedagogy

DANIEL SCOTT TYSDAL

Burgeoning writers are often moved to enrol in introductory creative writing courses by the same problem. They want to write X (a genre film, say, or a YA — young adults — novel), but they do not know where to start. In the introductory poetry workshop, this problem tends to take the following form: the students lack an awareness of poetic traditions (past and present) and they are better versed in other, apparently “non-poetic” mediums and media, from comics to film, from magazines and textbooks to the World Wide Web.

In this context, I find myself, as a poetry teacher, faced with a twofold responsibility: to introduce students to the tools used by poets past and present, and to encourage them to experiment with the media of their contemporary moment. In realizing this responsibility, one method I have had success with is meeting the student halfway, by, so to speak, beginning at the edge, the boundary that divides and unites varying mediums and forms. I have developed a series of hands-on exercises that encourage students to explore these regions where the poem and these other apparently “non-poetic” mediums and media* meet. In this essay, I will introduce you to the general horizon of my approach, lead you through four specific exercises (encouraging you, I hope, to begin some poems of your own), and conclude with some remarks on the benefits of exploring the convergence between the poem and the “non-poetic” medium.

1. Method: Writing Moments and the Two Main Mediums

There are two central elements to this process of beginning at the edge; they can be considered in terms of form and content. The form the process takes is the writing moment, while its content or subject is the presentation of the “non-poetic” as two general mediums (which I discuss below) from which we can move to different particular mediums.

Writing moments are micro-writing exercises that invite students to try their respective hands at the topic under discussion. I call these short exercises writing moments because of the helpful double meaning of moment. These writing moments are moments because they only take a moment to complete and because, when you undertake them, you will be “having a moment,” experiencing this break from the day-to-day that is more than likely common practice for you already as a writer: turning from a dinner table conversation or from a chat in transit or from a mindless stroll to your notebook to scribble down the line or the form or the vision that struck you.

Writing moments are designed with two goals in mind. The first is to immerse students in the meeting of life and art by coupling active practice with abstract explanation; their reading process becomes their writing process. The second is to initiate students into two of the extreme poles of the poetic practice: the work (the writing routine, the daily grind, the practice that becomes habit or possibly an addiction), and the inspiration (the burst of insight or feeling from which a poem often begins). Writing moments take place within the purview of both poles, nurturing habit and stimulating the composition of new work.

Regarding the turn to the “non-poetic,” the two general mediums I encourage students to explore when beginning at the edge are two that have long been the companions of poets: other artistic mediums and modes of communication. The rich tradition of ekphrastic poems about paintings is an example of the former, while an example of the latter is the capacity of different social media to link poets to other poets and new audiences. One way to explore these mediums as poets, then, is to approach specific artistic and communication mediums as a means of generating new poems and as a means of reworking the form of the poem as such. There are four different areas in which these resonances can be investigated: content, theme, form, and dissemination.

In the following sections, we will explore comic books as an example of an artistic medium, and Internet comment threads as an example of a medium of communication, in relation to three of the areas of resonance: content, theme, and form. The particular encounters we stage between poetry and comics, and poetry and comment threads, respectively, are designed to inspire students and to provide them with some new tools to test out. Students should, however, also be invited to undertake this same approach to the artistic mediums they are most passionate about (whether sculptures, movies, or video games) and to the communication technologies they are most involved in or most anxious about (whether Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or those not yet invented at the time of this writing).

Now, as we undertake the process of “beginning at the edge,” I want to shift gears in terms of address and approach. The following sections are addressed to “you” the student, and rather than simply discussing the practice, these sections offer the practice in action. The following material is aimed at students who have been introduced to some of the basic tools and concepts of poetry (imagery, free verse, blank verse, and couplet), but are by no means experts. If you are game, you will want to grab a superhero comic (in print or online) and load up a favourite comment thread, as we take our first steps with our companion mediums into the regions of content and theme.

2. Comics, Comments, Content, and Theme

With your comic in hand and your comment thread loaded, give them both a careful perusal: read, glance, flip, stare, and scroll. Become intimate with the life and language of the pages and posts.

Writing Moment #1

· Write a three- to four-line free verse stanza about your comic book (any aspect that you see fit).

· Write a couplet about your comment thread (any aspect you see fit). For the sake of practice, compose in blank verse or, simply, ten-syllable lines.

End of writing moment.

This is the most common approach to other mediums, taking the medium as the content or subject of your poem. To say this approach is the most common, though, is not to diminish it. In fact, this practice is both complex and essential. For one, composing with a specific medial content invigorates your form. Can you find the ways in which this happened in your first writing moment? If not, can you think of ways in which you could revise your work to encourage this influence? Three elements to consider are word choice, imagery, and voice.

In relation to your comic book, you could take on the diction of the heroes or villains, or you could employ the distinctive sound effects (for example, a fire-rendered BWKSSSSSS for a Bat Plane—fired missile), or the shared symbolia (the icons comics use to represent different states, such as a light bulb for an idea or bubbles for drunkenness). Attending to words could also prompt some play with puns; for example, you could riff on the link between Spider-Man’s web and the Latin root of the word text (textus), which means web. The lush colours and energetic shapes might influence your imagery or, on this same front, you may employ the visceral and iconic forms and actions of the heroes and villains who fight it out in the frames. Finally, regarding voice, comic books are easily teamed with personas. You could speak in the voice of a specific hero or villain, or explore their thoughts in a poetic register.

The same methodological invigoration occurs when poetry is paired with the comment thread. If the thread is specialized you can borrow its specific jargon; even if the thread is more general, you could still mimic the community’s use of Internet-speak. Imagery-wise, you could advance both literally or figuratively, drawing inspiration either from images in the posts and ads or from the (potentially “poetic”) imagery generated by commenters (clichés, perhaps, but clichés you can renew). The persona could also rouse some original work in this context as well. The Internet troll, the white knight, and all of the other comment thread regulars are ripe for lampooning or revealing unique views on what is beautiful or good or true.

As this remark on the true and good suggests, composing a poem about an artistic medium or a medium of communication can allow you to think about the timeless themes — ideas we have long struggled with or in which we have found solace — in a new way. Superhero comics, for example, lend themselves to meditations on topics such as justice, power, and the nature of evil. As a poet, though, working always with the aim of looking awry, you might not want to proceed so directly. Perhaps you could write a poem about Superman in which you reflect on weakness, or a poem about Batman in which forgiveness is the theme. Superhero catchphrases could also serve as fertile material. Take Spider-Man’s lesson (via Voltaire): “With great power comes great responsibility,” and explore its opposite: “With great weakness comes great irresponsibility.” Poems about comment threads could act as vehicles for mediations on communication, community, and freedom, or on silence, isolation, and oppression.

3. The Gutter and the Leap between Lines

Comic books can also help you develop your practice, expanding your range of compositional strategies, whether or not you are writing about a comic book. For example, the comic book can serve as a model for how you transition from one line to the next. This exercise is beneficial on three fronts, insofar as it helps you nurture three interconnected traits that often characterize a high-quality poem: concision, originality, and the leap (concerning the structure or development of a poem — a surprising, illuminating, defamiliarizing, stirring, and/or unbalancing shift in attention from one sentence to the next). In order to understand how this exercise works, though, we must first step away from poetry for a moment and turn to the gutter.

The gutter is comic book terminology for the gap between panels. It most often takes the form of white space between two black borders. The gutter divides panels, but it just as forcefully connects moments, providing the pause needed to create a distinct transition between panels rather than a senseless blur. Put another way, the gutter joins action in one panel to the action in the next, forming a sort of comic book sentence. Take a look at one page from your comic book, ideally a page that has a few gutters. How does the action transition from one panel to the next? How little or how much do we move in space and time? How does the new panel shift our attention? What is the new focus in terms of subject, proximity, and angle? These are the sorts of questions you can ask about the comic book page to, in a sense, spur it to shape your own practice. Once you have asked and answered enough of them, the next question to ask is: How can shifts between panels manifest in my poem in the shifts between sentences?

There is no right or wrong way to turn your answers to this question into practice, so I do not want to give you too many preconceived notions. However, my own endeavours with this exercise have suggested that there are two tips worth sharing. First, whether you are revising a poem or composing a new poem, employ a relational word to help you conceive of the relationship between your poem and the comic book page. In other words, work in concert or conflict with the comic, or aim to amplify or diminish the labour of its gutters. Second, make two separate attempts, employing two different comic book pages, to bring the benefits of this exercise into relief. You might even end up combining sections from the two very different results. To really gain from this second tip, use comic book pages created by different artists or, even better, by artists from different eras. The hodgepodge panel-construction of Golden Age comics (1930s and 40s) contrasts sharply (and, for our purposes, nicely) with the slick, integrated design of recent artists (see J.H. Williams III for the apex example).

Writing Moment #2

· Return to the three-or-four-line free verse stanza you composed for the previous writing moment.

· Revise this piece in concert with your comic book page.

· Do not be afraid to significantly revise lines or cut them entirely. Also, feel free to add new lines.

End of writing moment.

There are a number of ways to undertake this exercise. If you are a big comic book fan, select a page from three of your favourite comics. Next, summon up a strong memory of an encounter with comic books or popular culture, and compose a three-stanza poem, with each stanza working in concert with one of the three pages. If you are not a comic book fan, you could write a three-stanza poem about a topic of your choice, and work in conflict with pages from three different eras of comics. Another productive approach is to rewrite a famous poem using a variation of either of these approaches.

As I’ve suggested, the central benefits to this exercise are threefold. Greater concision often results as the comic encourages you to remove lines that fill the “gutters” of your poem, cramming the effective blanks with unneeded information, superfluous words, and conventional digressions. Furthermore, we all fall into ruts when it comes to ordering our poems. This exercise helps shake you out of your habitual developmental logics. Not only does it challenge your usual organizational patterns, but it may also inspire you to refine new patterns. These new structures, coupled with concision, will combine to fill your poems with leaps and jumps between lines that surprise and challenge your reader.

4. The Reply and the Swerve

You can undertake the same generative exercise in concert (or in conflict) with the comment thread. Here, though, the reply replaces the gutter as the active element.

Once again, you want to employ different relational words to help conceive of your relationship (in other words, work in concert or in conflict, heighten the influence of the thread or diminish it). Your work will gain depth from revising or attempting the same poem twice in combination with two different comment threads.

The questions we ask of the reply and the comment thread differ slightly from the questions asked of the gutter and the comic book page. For example, you want to consider the voice of the reply. What is the poster’s motivation and persona? Composing lines in combination with different posters would give your poem a thrilling choral effect. Attend also to the language of the replies: sentence structure, word choice, speech acts. You could even quote replies. For example, borrow a question from the thread and then answer it in your poem. Ignoring all the replies that come in between, ask: What is the logic that connects an original comment to its most distant reply? Can you compose two lines of poetry bound by this same logic? Add to the comment thread and see what type of new replies and, in turn, new potential material, your contribution generates.

Writing Moment #3

· Return to your couplet about your comment thread.

· Revise this couplet in concert with your comment thread.

· Do not feel obliged to stick to the metrical or syllabic restriction established in the earlier writing moment.

End of writing moment.

Concision might not result from this exercise. However, as with our encounter with the gutter, companioning with the reply breaks your habits of order and organization and nurtures the leap. In this instance, the leap comes from the unusual swerve, the surprising jump in thought, shift in attention, or striking image.

5. Comics, Comments, and Layout

What if we went one step further in the meeting between poetic and non-poetic forms? What if, to perhaps stretch the metaphor too far, we, as poets, hopped onto these mediums’ respective backs and created poems that were comic books and comment threads?

In terms of the act of composition, this is one of the most exhilarating, challenging, and border-bending ways we can write with a combination of image and text. In a way, this practice involves composing with a new pen and responding to a new speaker. New speakers are those who favour such hybrid works: comics, websites, graphic literature, and so on. Our new pens are technological devices, such as laptops and phones, and accompanying programs, such as Photoshop and InDesign, which allow us to bring innovative poems to life.

We undertake this practice in the same manner as our two earlier encounters with comics and comments. Only now, instead of attending to one element, we attend to all possible elements, in particular the physical, visible appearance of the medium. In others words, you transform the material appearance of the poem by adopting the layout conventions of your chosen medium as the layout conventions for your poem. Compose a poem about a comic that is itself a comic. Create a comment thread poem that is a comment thread.

The means of proceeding are many. The high- and low-tech are both options: utilize the authenticity gained with a laptop and its programs or go with old-fashioned pen and paper. While designing the layout, you could take the opportunity to draw in your readers further by making them active participants. Ink your poem into word balloons but leave the panels blank for your reader to fill, figuratively or literally. Leave blank comment boxes for the same purpose. You may also go “right to the source” in both cases. Digitally or manually remove the words from an actual comic book page and add your own. Post your poem on the comment thread of your blog, one comment box for each line, so your friends and readers can add to the poem with their replies. With these possibilities in mind, undertake the following writing moment.

Writing Moment #4

· What are two or three different ways that you could transform your poem about a comic book into a poem that is also a comic book?

· What are two or three different ways that you could transform your poem about comment threads into a poem that is also a comment thread?

End of writing moment.

This concludes the final example of “beginning at the edge.” I hope it takes us far from conventional practice, and demonstrates the benefits of leaping away from conformity with convention and swerving from the uniformity of tradition. In fact, this pair of companion mediums inflects the word uniformity, suggesting the need to, every now and then, break with uniformity (work with a single form) and test out some hybrid, mongrel, and Frankensteinian forms.

6. Conclusion: The Benefits of Writing Moments and Beginning at the Edge

In employing these tiered, writing moment—filled assignments and encouraging students to experiment with the meeting between the poem and the supposedly non-poetic medium, I have discovered a number of benefits. Beginning students in particular value them for two reasons. First, a number have suggested that these writing moments take the pressure off by encouraging the act of writing without requesting a completed poem. Second, they seem to like the way in which, more often than not, practice precedes abstraction in these writing moments. In other words, they are practising with the tool or technique in concert with learning its abstract definition and structure.

It is worth adding that I follow up a collection of tiered writing moments with exercises designed to encourage the creation of complete poems. First, I invite students to return to the material they created during their writing moments and to compose one or two new poems. In the current case, they might compose a poem in the language of comics or comment threads, or compose a poem employing a comic book character or an Internet commenter as a persona. I also provide three- or four-tool/technique-relevant ­writing exercises. For example, I suggest students translate a famous poem into a comic book. This may involve making an actual comic or writing a lyrical description of the poem cum comic. Or students may compose a comment thread for a famous poem. They could people the comment thread with other famous poets, with critics, with a series of less distinct poetic voices, with the usual band of Internet commenters, or with some combination of all of them.

The benefits of “beginning at the edge” are multiple, too. For one, this practice offers a unique way of introducing students to core tools, techniques, and traditions, showing them the creative value of tending artfully and carefully to the tools of the trade. I have developed similarly structured exercises that cover everything from metaphor to metre to layout, and I lead students to compose in concert with everything from memes to textbooks to the art gallery. While grounding students in core tools and techniques, these meetings between poem and non-poem also encourage them to compose original, innovative, and timely works. Finally, “beginning at the edge” pushes students to reflect on the territory they share (or could potentially share) with other creators and makers, providing them with maps for exploring these boundaries that link as much as they divide.

*I find it useful to distinguish between the two plurals media and mediums. For modes of communication (especially electronic communication), media serves well: the news media, social media, films, TV, and so forth. But I prefer to use mediums for the different category that includes modes of expression and artistic genres: poetry, prose, literature in general, the visual arts, video games, performance arts, and others.