[New-Poetry] Re: Shakespeare in Dogpatch

[David Graham]

Yes, if a 4-panel strip is a sonnet, I suppose a single-panel one is  
something even more intense & difficult to make work, a haiku or  
epigram.

Given my current obsessions, the aspect of all this that most  
intrigues me is the *regularity* of such comic strips, playing out  
over long periods of time.  Keeping things fresh, performing  
variations on themes while advancing multiple narrative lines, making  
each strip self-contained while also part of a larger arc, letting  
surprises occur while maintaining a central stylistic identity, etc.-- 
and doing all this day after day, week after week, year after year-- 
these are stiff  challenges.  Those who succeed, like Gary Trudeau,  
have my entire admiration.

Not limited to comic strip artists, of course.  I recall someone  
asking Russell Baker how he managed to write all those columns over  
so many years.  What do you do, the interviewer wanted to know, when  
the deadline's upon you and, well, the column just isn't very good?   
Baker said, in essence, "what I do is publish it!"

I do wonder if Goldbarth pays much attention to current comics.  The  
qualities he praises in Krazy Kat, etc., don't strike me as things of  
the past at all.  There are a number of strips in our Milwaukee paper  
that do just what he describes the old-time strips doing.   
Dunesbury's the most consistently successful, to my eyes, but there  
are others.




========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu

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

Poetry Library:
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==========================================



On Nov 13, 2007, at 8:59 AM, Jeff Newberry wrote:

> David,
>
> I've long noticed a similiarty between comic strips and poetry.    
> I've even blogged about it, but I've long since taken the post down.
>
> My interest, however, is in single-panel strips, particularly those  
> that are narrative in some sense.  I like how some single-panel  
> cartoons (say Dennis the Menace  or Marmaduke or a host of others)  
> imply a long-standing narrative without depending on said narrative  
> for the cartoon's effectiveness.
>
> I've been thinking (for years now, actually) that a certain class  
> of lyric poems do the same:  they imply narrative without depending  
> on it, if that makes any sense.
>
> Thanks for the heads up on Goldbarth.
>
> Best,
>
> Jeff Newberry
>
> On Nov 13, 2007 9:40 AM, David Graham <grahamd at ripon.edu> wrote:
> 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
>
>
> ========================================
> 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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>
> -- 
> "Memory believes before knowing remembers.  Believes longer than  
> recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."
> —William Faulkner, Light in August
>
>
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