Response to "What is Comics Poetry"

     In this essay, Alexander Rothman gave me a pretty good idea of what comics poetry is. I have become more conscious of this form of work recently and have also began to see it manifest more and more around me; I've also noticed that this form of work has always intrigued me subconsciously but I never really knew how to approach it.  My understanding is that poetry and comics are difficult to comprise on their own; this new form combines both mediums and I now realize how they can seem simple at a glance but are actually "exceptionally difficult" as Rothman stated. Now that I am recalling my encounters with comics poetry, the first thing that comes to my mind is Ida Applebroog's artists' books. I deeply appreciate the exposure to Ida Applebroog's books towards the beginning of WARP because I think it was one of those things that really helped me push my ability to be aware of this "subjective bridging" that occurs in art.

      Alexander Rothman illustrates how one can go about reading comics poetry by proposing questions like "What are the effects of these choices and their repetition?" under some of the examples he gave; we must be aware of the "visual choices" of these works as we would be with any other works of art. Knowing this makes me think of Chris Ware as a true pioneer of this form of work. Chris Ware brought his bountiful knowledge of visual arts into his comics; when creating them he asked questions like "When you have all the tools of visual arts at your disposal, then why put words in balloons?". Ware also choses to avoid using perspective in his comics because to him it doesn't "effectively translates the way we remember physical space into the two-dimensional form of ­comics" (from an interview with The Paris Review). The introduction to this form of work really reinforces how important it is for us to stray from our habit to quickly consume information around us like we were shaped to but instead slow down and really try to understand works of art and as Rothman puts, "walk a mile or two in someone else's brain."