[New-Poetry] Shakespeare in Dogpatch

[David Graham]

Albert Goldbarth on the links between poetry & old-time comic strips:

"I mean the limits and promises written into the form itself. Each  
day's strip was standardly four panels, a structure as exacting as a  
sonnet's. (When poet-maestro Richard Wilbur says, "The Genie gains  
his power from being in the lamp," he may as well be referencing  
"Steve Canyon.") Within that restricted rhythm, Ted Osborne (who  
wrote "The Race for the Riches") needed to pick up the thread of an  
ongoing story line; develop it forward one plot-point a day; include  
a moment of payoff -- comedy, crisis or revelation; and deliver his  
readers safely to a stopping place that still contained an impetus  
toward the next day's strip. And all of this done entertainingly  
(sometimes movingly) and without going stale. Really -- what an  
accomplishment!

When I look at my own work, marked by many series of what a few  
reviewers have called loose sonnets (usually unrhymed blocks of 14  
lines), it's easy to see how Mickey and Minnie have been translated  
into my friends, and their rollicking adventures into the terms of  
21st century politics or Hawking-esque cosmology. Every block-of-a- 
sonnet is a panel that hopes to have its individual infrastructure,  
even as it ultimately contributes toward a larger, ongoing entity  
called a "sonnet sequence." I'm not alone in this. I don't know if  
John Berryman would have nodded toward the comics as an inspiring  
source of structure (and mongrel wordplay) for his "Dream Songs," but  
I think his sonnets have genes in common with "Krazy Kat" as  
meaningfully as with Shakespeare."

--Albert Goldbarth.  fr. "Shakespeare in Dogpatch:  Of Sonnets and  
Comic Strips."
Full article here:
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk- 
goldbarth5aug05,0,3766826.story?coll=la-books-headlines


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David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu

Home Page:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/About%20Me.html

Poetry Library:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
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