Jeffrey Wilson "Boom"

Jeff Wilson

10/10/11

ENGL 410

            My visual poem is called “boom” because I wanted a title that communicated the idea as succinctly as possible.  The poem itself is pretty simple: I found a black-and-white picture of a mushroom cloud online, as well as an image of the Sanskrit text, which I pasted over the picture multiple times, and then, I trimmed it so that the text was framed on the cloud and wrote “boom” in big black letters at the bottom.  The Sanskrit quote is taken from the Bhagavad Gita and it is the same section that Oppenheimer quoted when he tested the first nuclear bomb:

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

In any case, I decided to configure the poem this way because I thought it looked pretty cool and I wanted it to resonate with the world around me without being too pretentious about it.  I put the title at the bottom to sort of offset the reference to the godhood of Krishna and to bring the poem back down to its essential meaning.

            McCloud said in chapter two that “Words are totally abstract icons.  That is, they bear no resemblance at all to the real McCoy.”  Obviously, substituting words for images is an old trick in visual poetry, but I couldn’t resist doing it with “boom.”  With the Sanskrit, I added another level to the poem, in that, I can’t actually read Sanskrit, so it’s an abstract icon that doesn’t have any direct meaning because I can only understand it through translation.  The resulting ambiguity of meaning then corresponds with the idea of abstraction as “anti-narrative,” which “can ‘hide’ within the folds of narrative itself and suggest its own meanings that are intertwined with those promoted by acts of storytelling,” according to Baetens in her abstract comics article.  For me, the Sanskrit letters are meaningless without the translation.  However, the appearance of the letters on the image evoke in my mind both the grandeur of Hindu mythology and, because of the white outlines on a black background, the imprints of people and things annihilated by the nukes that were imprinted on walls and sidewalks. 

Here is my visual poem.  It is entitled "boom."  Also, I figured I'd mention that the Sanskrit letters spell out a verse from the Bhagavad Gita often translated as "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.