Apollonia Galvan “By Any Means Necessary”

Apollonia Galvan

10/10/11

ENGL 410 – Graphic Novels Seminar

Prof. Barnstone

Graphic Poetry Project – Introduction

An Introduction to the graphic illustration of “By Any Means Necessary”

            To start off, in attempting this graphic poem project, I came to the decision to create an illustration of my own poem written nearly a year ago entitled “By Any Means Necessary.” I found this poem warranted an intriguing graphic visual and textual layout, despite my amateur and frankly, unskillful drawing style. Visually, I knew I wanted to capture the setting of the poem: an empty, isolated asphalt road that functions as the resting place of a dead dog. Hence, my goal was to place the reader at the scene without them really being there, initially allowing their mind to adjust to the poem’s environment. On this aspect of the work, I wanted to appeal to the reader’s optical faculty based on how McCloud defines how “all of us perceive the world as a whole through the experience of our senses” (McCloud, 62). The reader or witness is drawn into a work on the rudimentary level of sight, thus the reason for my formulation of this simple and direct graphic. With regards to the textual syntax of the poem, I had the desire to incorporate movement to the words. I felt that the physical motion and design of the words would make the viewers’ eyes dance and allow the sound of the words to manifest in the reader’s mind. For example, the visual look of the words, “hissing” and “whooshing” in the poem essentially mirror the vocal pronunciation of those terms, not to mention, adds to the poem’s eerie atmospheric quality. Furthermore, it allows the individual to have fun with the sounds of the poetic words as well makes them an active participant in the reading. Also, the layout of the text represents the literal action that is occurring at that point in the poem, case in point, the circular nature of the sentence; “Everyone hoarded around the scene like cattle.” The arrangement of some of the text fundamentally is there to draw a picture for the reader and additionally precipitates them to crank their neck sideways in order to read, keeping the participatory role alive. In collaboration with the piece’s textual positioning, the concept I wanted to include and play with was metaphorical and symbolic. The instance of this play with symbolism is found non-coincidentally in the middle of the illustration or the road. The text localized in the section consisting of the road is meant to be the dog. That is to say, nearly every reference to the dog, characterized by “it” or by the verbs describing the dog’s condition, are present in the road and are meant to represent not only its last resting place or grave, but the permanency of this memento mori for the characters in the poem as well as the reader. Not only is the dog imprinted in the first page of the illustration embodied by those words, but in the final page of the poem containing the last line: “It never left,” shows the lingering nature of the dog’s corpse represented by the orange tinged words. It leaves the reader with a sense of endurance and the infinite (the endless road and the duration of the spectators’ traumatizing experience) along with the finite (death/mortality). Therefore, the image and text placement is meant to evoke this concept of death and endlessness to the reader or at least allow them the ability to analyze and discern the image’s reason for being laid out this way. Once again, like McCloud asserts, my intention is to capture the individual’s “phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole in the form of closure” (McCloud, 63). That is to say that my work is an effort to test the reader’s examination of the poem’s fragmentary arrangement and its visual aspect and ultimately reach some form of understanding or closure of the poem’s message and themes. Lastly, the process from text to image causes the poem to be read in a variety of ways, either vertically down a column, side by side of each column or straight down the middle of the road which holds the poem’s most powerful message of infinity and permanency. In other words, the poem can be read based on the reader’s mood or his or her desired directional preference creating a unique meaning each time.