Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? Unless you’re an English teacher, my guess is your answer would’ve been, “What’s poetry?” I, frankly, wouldn’t have known either if one of my co-workers didn’t sorta make it a thing over here by posting verses on a nearby board.
The poets.org site tells me that “National Poetry Month is now held every April, when publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, schools and poets around the country band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture.” There’s a Poem In Your Pocket Day coming up April 26, where you’re supposed to recite verses that you happen to have stored in your shirt pocket. (Good think I checked; I’ve got a week or so to raid my library of dirty limericks.) The site also suggests reading interviews and literary criticism. Now, this is the “Webcomic Overlook,” unfortunately, not the “Poetry Overlook,” so I don’t be tossing out my scathing opinions on Sylvia Plath.
And webcomics can’t be poetry … or … can they? After all, webcomics are visual, and, as poetry critic Jan Schrieber says, poetry is partly defined by sound: “To make that formula a little more explicit, we can say that a poem, being a creature of language, has meanings that are conveyed through linguistic means, and being also a creature of sound (which is not incidental as in prose but structural), has the potential to affect the hearer’s sensibility through auditory stimulus, including rhythmic patterning, the repetition or modulation of phones (speech sounds), and the strategic deployment of silence.”
If I were to dabble in the realm of evoking imagery through aesthetic language, then perhaps one place to start would be with Chilean comic creator Juan Santapau and his webcomic The Secret Knots.
