Jeanette Reyna "Heritage"

Jeannette Reyna

Enlish 410

11 October 2011

Graphic Poetry Project

Heritage

Expression through art, whether written or drawn, is difficult for me to produce. I developed anxiety and tension throughout the process of creating the project. I feel this tension when I look at the final images of my project as the words are clearly juxtaposed from the text. Lacking artistic ability, I felt using a form of collage would be the best way for me to produce a graphic poem. Although the photographs I selected are strong images, I feel my words give the images an added dimension of understanding or raise questions about themes expressed within the image itself.

Questions of cultural identity have long informed my attempt to understand the world around me. Taking Chican@ Literature with Dr. Arroyo has only multiplied those questions and a need to express them in some form. The first graphic poem utilizes street art by Banksy that appeared in my hometown of Boyle Heights earlier this year. This image has either been called Caution!, Fun or Kite Dream. The image is an iconic one that appears along highways between the United States and Mexico border in California, most notably between San Diego and San Ysidro. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud explains that an iconic image, “like the atom, [has] great power locked in [those] few simple lines” and they “demand our participation to make them work” (45, 59). The sign is iconic as a California road sign because of the goldenrod background. This sign has cultural significance because it is only featured by the international border where illegal border crossings appear to be the norm and motorists must be warned of the potential risk of pedestrians on the highway. Banksy has altered the sign by placing a flying kite attached to the man’s had. Underneath the image, I have added the inscription “We still have our dreams, but which way do we run?”. In viewing the original street art, we participate in the act of “reading” the image, while reading the inscription raises questions about what the message of the art actually is. Most people could easily identify the image as a road sign parody. However, as we read the image and compare it to the original sign, we notice that the runners are going in the opposite direction. Are these runners in fact going back to Mexico, or are they running somewhere else? The nuance of this piece and its placement in Boyle Heights allows for much to be discussed.

The second collage-esque image is inspired by William Blake’s illuminated poems and Frida Khalo’s penchant for placing an inscription in her paintings. The photograph is from John Rees’ dia de los muertos series and features a woman with a calavera face sitting on a seated elk type animal. In “Imaging Interiority: Photography, Psychology, and Lyric Poetry,” Laura Mandell argues that “the medium of photography shows us that romantic interiority may be understood as itself a byproduct of literary authors’ investigations of the limitations of printed media before 1810” (218-219). The inward turn characterized by Romantic poetry features the attempt to understand the outside world from within. Mandell points out that a critical theme in the lyrics of Blake and Wordsworth is the expression of the loss of sound. With poems having the ability of being made available through larger production runs, the reading aloud of a poem was not essential in the poetry experience. Blake’s attempt to create voice and sound in his poems is displayed through his illuminated texts. The images correspond to the text; however, sometimes the text was unclear and would need to be sounded out to understand. Blake also incorporated words into his lyrics that suggest sound, such as song, laugh, and voice. A photograph provides an inner dialogue for the photographer, but it is also void of sound. The voice disappears and all we can experience is what we see. This does not mean that the poem or photograph lacks as an art form, it just means that the reader or viewer’s understanding is limited. In an attempt to bring sound, and more specifically a voice, to John Rees’ photograph my poem uses Blake’s example of incorporating words that suggest sound, llanto, voice, and whistle. Because the poem appears as an inscription above the calavera woman, the words can be perceived to be spoken by the photographer. The portrait is a sill image of a moment in time and the inscription allows the viewer to temporarily travel into the photographer’s inner space to gain insight into that moment.