Lucy In the Sky With Darrell: Actualism Part 3
| Lucy In the Sky With Darrell | |
Part 3 The Story of Actualism In Iowa City Poetry Comics
Poetry in Motion
WEINSTEIN: ARE POETRY COMICS TOO GRAPHIC? Jeff Weinstein The Village Voice New York, NY Jul. 29-Aug. 4, 1981 Poetry in Motion--In 1978 someone told Dave Morice that good poems would paint pictures in yourmind. A lightbulb went on over the poet’s head. Why not Poetry Comics?
Unless you write poems, the chances that you have read any contemporary poetry within the last year, or even the last 10 years, or slim. This is not criticism of the average reader, or of the average poet; it’s just the way of the poetry world. You may have nibbled at a sonnet with a famous byline in The New Yorker, or tried to swallow one of the well-meant meter- laden exercises in the back pages of The Nation, because this is all that’s generally available. But do you remember the poem? Do you talk about it? Do you want to read more? New poetry is mostly for poets only. Poets publish and distribute their own and other poets’ work in hundreds of small- press books and magazines. Poets read these poems (at least they always read themselves), argue about them, make a living by teaching them. Poets attend each others’ readings, praise and backbite, as- sort themselves into schools of differing influences and direction. The poetry world in this country is a tight little island, even more circumscribed than the art world or theater world, which at least acknowledge outside interest and support. Internecine poetry-world struggles may seem lively to an insider, but from outside, it’s a bit like watching people eat their own vomit. On the other hand, if poets don’t take care of themselves, who will? Certainly not major publishers, who aren’t disposed to print literature for which screen rights can’t be sold. A university press might, if the poet teaches at the same university, and promises not to feel too bad if the work is remaindered in three months because no one paid $12.95 for 87 unpromoted pages in cloth. Government small-press funding, an important source for poets and writers, is slowly going the way of all funding: to grants tomb. Present exceptions to poets-onlyh poems usually spring from the schools of poetry that try to speak to specific-audience groups: feminist, gay and lesbian, black, Hispanic, and Native American. Not all this work is wonderful, or even what the poet-poets call competent--think of a cat- agory where that isn’t true--and its au- diences are insular by definition; but it is being read by nonpoets. Although one would hope that some poet-poets would notice this, specific-interest poetry is not taken seriously by “professional poets” be- cause it breaks their rules: it supposedly lacks awareness of formal English- language tradition, it flaunts its historical content, and untrained people can read it, want to read it. Content and popularityare anathema to most of the poets-only poetry world; they connote a lackof seriousness. The poetry world distrusts popularity so much that it has sometimes disowned its own stars. But lately, the poetry world has not produced any stars. Nor is there a public democracy of exciting poets. We can only hope for Emily Dickinsons. Poetry, at the moment, is quiet. It may be that this reti- cence, this apparent unconcern with the world, is a failure not only of the poetry support system or of a postliterate, image- oriented audience, but of contemporary poetry itself. One of the tactics of modern- ism, of contemporary art of any kind, is to find its audience, toinvent it if need be, or at least to try.
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If I wasn’t on the outskirts of the poetry world I would never have received copies of Dave Morice’s Poetry Comics in the mail. At first I didn’t know what they were, couldn’t place them, which is a good sign. As they piled up in the bathroom I began to see first how amusing they are, and then how smart. It’s one thing to illustrate, com- ic-book style, Coleridge’s “Rime of the An- cient Mariner” (issue number 12), a classic story that lends itself to narrative illustra- tion. Anyone who used Classics Illustrated comics to slog through Adam Bede in high school knows the predecessor here. It’s something else, though, to break “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams (“so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens”) into narrative frames, as Morice does on the first page of the first issue, or to storify excerpts from Robert Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” (everybody’s favorite), or, most tellingly, to request submissions from poetry-world poets to bge comicized. This is not a Joe Brainard-like reciprocal col- laboration of a visual artist and poets. Although there is a tradition of inspiration in English poetry, either by religion, the secular muses, or the Romantic spirit of nature and dream, Morice’s inspiration is poetry itself. Poetry makes him want to draw comics. He is also inspired by the poets-only poetry world. Of course, Dave Morice, 34, is a poet. He has been writing poems since he was six. Once a student at the University of Iowa’s Creative Writing Program--Iowa City is the geographic center of the poetry world--Morice, sometimes known as Dr. Alphabet, publicly spray-painted the world’s longest poem, connecting New Jersey and Pennsylvania, across the New Hope-Lambertville Bridge. He invented “Joyce Holland,” a minimalist poet (her one-word poems, Matchbook, are stapled inside matchbooks) and performance artist who had no small effect on the poetry world; for three years Morice hired an actress to concretize her at readings. Morice also single-handedly created a now-famous school of poetry--famous to poets, anyway--called Cutism. His Cutist Anthology includes poems by Sally Lunchkins, Tommy Triped and others. “Have a nice day” artwork by Roberta Periwinkleshoe, and the requisite de- fensive polemic by Samuel F. Romular. Morice’s send-ups attest to his connection to a school of poetry that began in Iowa City (a real school, I think) called Ac- tualism. “Actualism does to things what light does to them,” says Darrell Gray in the Actualist Manifesto. “Cute, Cuter, Cutist,” says Morice, in the lost Cutist Manifesto. In 1978 someone told Morice that “good poems would paint pictures in your mind.” Morice wondered how “Prufrock” and Syl- via Plath’s “Daddy” would look as comics, so he drew them, publishing “Daddy” the next year in Poetry Comics No. 1, which he mailed to poets around the country. “Nev- er liked Sylvia Plath before you,” wrote Harley Lond, editor of San Francisco’s small-press Intermedia magazine. Poet- praise came rolling in: “Absolutely brilliant…” (Bill Zavatsky), “i love ‘em & so does my eight year old” (Joel Op- enheimer), “Terrific” (Maureen Owen), “… break through stony accretions!” (Anne Waldman), “… best buy in the universe” (Robert Creeley), etc., along with offers to use their work. Since poets ]snapped at the bait, Morice published their hermatic letters, and any others he received, in the Muse’s Mailbag, now a regular feature of the magazine. Poetry Comics began to illustrate the boundaries of the poetry world; poets love to be pub- lished in any form. The comics, however, are works in themselves. Literary tradition sits heavily on poets, and avant-garde poets since Apollinaire have tried to throw it off by attempty to “demystify” both their own work and poetry in general. Morice de- mystifies by juxtaposing familiar poems with various--and variously successful-- borrowed and original cartoon styles, sometimes to funny and sometimes to touching effect. But he also creates a story where little or none was apparent before by heightening the narrative affinity of language, an affinity more than one school of present poets absolutely denies. Nar- rativeness doesn’t harm poetry; even his attempt to frame, for example, the non- word syllables of John Cage into a nar- rative progression still acknowledges the randomness, the integrity, of the original. Since narrative has had a bad rep among modern poets, not everyone likes Morice’s supposed playing around. Denise Levertov mailed Morice her reservations, which he published: “… The thing is, as with parodies, a humorous angle on a non-hu- morous work of art may have the un- fortunate effect of spoiling the original-- i.e., one is liable to always have the recol- lection of the jokey version looming up and obstructing any further receptivity8 to some beautiful poem or painting.” It’s a weak poem that can’t hold its own, and Levertov doesn’t see how the comics are sometimes homages to the original, some- times creative readings, and always work in themselves. The “beautiful object” the- ory of poetry has kept a lot of people at arm’s length from some great work. Morice’s comiocs do more than defusde cant; they help to revivify poetry. Comic books are worth attention too, and so didact Morice, who teachers poetry to children and senior citizens and is adept at engaging them with tricks of the poetry teacher’s trade., demystifies once again by treating adult poet-poets to games, puzzles, an elaborate poetry crossword (first prize was $20 and 20 comic books, and a poetry anthology), an Ana- gramarama (Walt Whitman – Law? Haw! I’m TNT), and Poetrivia (“In 1858 , Emily Dickinson served as judge in the Bread Division of the Cattle Show in Amherst”). Last year Morice began to send PC out of the poetry world, to a judiciously selected group of “famous people” who are not, to my knowledge, poets, and printed some of the interlopers’ responses in the Muse’s Mailbag. Art Linkletter, Liza Minnelli, Virgil Partch, Elizabeth Taylor Warner, S. I. Hayakawa, Vincent Price, Clayton Moore (the Lone Ranger), Pearl Bailey, John Kenneth Galbraith, or their secretar- ies, to name a few, acknowledged receipt. Many, like Ruth Gordon, were pleased: “Your comics have a lot of style. A lot of drive. And nice to hear from Iowa City. I played a one night stand there in late 1916 or 1917 early on. Fair and Warmer. My second year of acting and I was a leading lady.” But others were less accessible. “Since this type of humor is not the kind that Lily finds amusing I am returning it to you without having presented it to her.-- Julie Harding, Secretary/Assistant to Lily Tomilin.” Morice sent these copies out of curiosity, but also as a work of mail art. (Mail art--using the post office to dis- tribute work made expressly to be mailed) has been utilized by artists like Eleanor Antin to comment on, and solve by in- corporating into their art, the problems out of towners face in a New York cfen- tered art and publishing world. With the right mailing list…) If only distribution were poetry’s major problem. One can’t expect a public to hang on every word of even the best modern work the way a great proportion of the English readership tracked Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as if it were news. (A “great proportion” of England’s readers in |
