Poetry Comics Month, Week 1

A Journey in Words and Pictures

The second annual Poetry Comics Month began with The Red Umbrella, a story poem told in watercolor waves. Follow me on this journey in words and pictures throughout November. I’ll draw new poetry comics daily and share the work of other great artists working in the form.

Day 2: Three-Dimensional

Creating a poetry comic feels like maintaining a house—one that’s old and stately and possibly haunted. I have to keep the windows painted and the flowers tended, but I want just enough feral cats lurking in the shadows to keep things interesting.

When I wrote a piece on How To Make Poetry Comics in April, I proposed the idea of a three-dimensional comic. “Facade” was my first attempt at 3D panels. I think poetry comics, like people, often have more going on than what’s visible on the surface.

Day 3: Messy

I have a tendency to fall into familiar rules and patterns, whether self-imposed or directed by others. But when I can experiment with a new art medium and get messy, breakthroughs happen. Thanks to my 9-year-old son for creating the paint splatter in the last panel. I was surprised to find he’d heard of Jackson Pollock.

The balance between order and chaos makes a page of comics, or any work of art, interesting. Too much order, the work feels rigid and without feeling. Too much chaos, it becomes an indecipherable mess.

Day 4: Haiku

It’s fun to take familiar poetic forms and stretch them to fit the comics page. Haiku is a perfect example of a seemingly simple type of poem that can be adapted to make a poetry comic.

I love reading haiku in translation, and I love reading other poets write about haiku.

Jason McBride

wrote a wonderful piece on Japanese and English haiku called Putting the Right Words in the Right Places. And

Sal Randolph

wrote this great post about haiku and the seasons called Ways of Seeing: Seasonal Feeling.

Here’s the poem I wrote that inspired the comic above. It follows the traditional 5/7/5 syllable format you probably learned in school. I abandoned the syllable constraint for the comic version to simplify the wording even more.

     Small Wonder

     these drops of water
     jewels clinging to a branch
     stop me in my tracks

Day 5: Single Panel

Is a single panel poetry comic actually a comic? I think yes—if you get a sensation of time passing. And even better if it evokes a feeling of wonder expanding.

Former US poet laureate Ted Kooser who compared a blue heron waiting at a pond to a lovelorn poet perched over a desk, waiting to spear the right word like a fish. Now that image enters my head whenever I see the herons at my neighborhood pond. Poetry takes patience. But when the moment is right, the poet tries to swallow the world in one gulp of language.

Day 6: Very Short

“I would have written you a shorter poem, but I didn’t have enough time.”

I often try to stretch an idea for a comic to 9, 12, or 16 panels. But when I make a poetry comic of only a few words and a couple panels, I feel like I’ve pulled off a magic trick. I have a realization: maybe brevity is the soul of wit and poetry. Then I’m back to making another 20 panel comic…

Day 7: Senses

How can a poetry comic engage the senses? It’s been a beautiful autumn week here in Wichita, Kansas. Beyond the trees in my backyard, fog covered the neighborhood pond on Monday morning. My daughter told me she looked out the window and said, “I can’t tell where the water ends and the sky begins.” I jotted that line in my sketchbook to use for a future poetry comic.

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If you’d like to create your own poetry comics, here are some prompts you can use. Post your work on social media with the tag #poetrycomicsmonth, and I’ll share some of reader submissions in a future post. Or take your work in an entirely new direction. I hope you enjoy your own journey in words and pictures.

My upcoming book POETRY COMICS will be out this spring from Chronicle Kids Books. It features 90 pages of brand new poetry comics for all ages in vivid color. You can pre-order it worldwide wherever you get your books.