Faculty Talk with Dr. Kate Polak, "How the Stone Speaks" on 4/16 @ 11am

As my thinking on the intersections between form and affective registers has developed, I’ve increasingly become invested in how two distinct literary/artistic forms, comics and poetry, have maintained certain resonances over at least four millennia. At first flush, they may seem oppositional: “low” versus “high” culture, illustrations versus economy of language, legibility versus mystery. However, they share a great deal in common in part because of their formal qualities. Poetry is an art of gaps; lineation, stanza length, spacing, allusion, and metaphor all suggest an artform of both presence and absence. Comics, in the same vein, use iconicity, closure, gutters, limited narratorial voices, and other tools to prompt the reader to make connections both within the narrative and between the reader-creator-character triad.

In this section of the larger monograph project, I revise the "history" of graphic narratives through ancient poetics. Touring cave art, the temples of Sumer, the Acropolis, and Egyptian tombs, I argue that graphic narratives and poetry have always been mutually-constitutive forms feeding off of one another's gapped, iconic, and realistic syntaxes. I explore both the technologies and psychological registers of the production of these ancient artifacts to develop a more complete history of the development of comics in conversation with the evolution of poetry. I am primarily interested in illustrating the links between these two forms in terms of representational and interpretive strategies, taking ancient theories of poetics and aligning them with contemporaneous visual art.

In addition, I wish to close the discussion with a few poems from Hoetry, a collection of dramatic monologues I wrote from the perspectives of various sex workers from a range of cultures between 4000 BCE to the 1990s CE. I will confine these examples to those poems from the perspectives of ancient women engaged in prostitution.

image credit: brown paper bag by clikr, licensed under CC0 / public domain declaration