Daniel Quele-Madrid

Professor Tony Barnstone

English 410: Senior Seminar: Graphic Novels and Graphic Poems

11^th October 2011

Graphic Poetry Project – Introduction

“Paradox:” An Unnourished Uncertainty

            “Paradox” seeks to refurnish in the mind the uncertainties that are not foreign within the realm of life. Paradoxes serve to illicit answers that are elusive to the nature of their questions, often leaving life lingering in doubt with seldom resolved but often explored questions.  Graphic poetry is to the traditional sense of the word poetry a deviance from which it escaped but from which otherwise it would not have existed. This departure from the norm is what I have hoped to capture as to showcase that the certainties cannot exists without the uncertainties just as much as a graphic poetry is merely just a graphic without the poetry of it to offer a distinctive life onto its very own.

The text serves as an illustration itself as a captured voice enmeshed within the simplicity of a paradox absorbed in the complexities of its uncertainties.  A paradox can be expressed with a few words, as in “War in Peace” and “Freedom is slavery” from George Orwell, though the extent of its significance is much greater, though often rather entertaining to examine in an attempt to digest its meaning and connection to life.  R.P. Draper’s “Concrete Poetry” explains that “concrete poetry is a game, a delightful one for the poet to devise and, when successful, a source of delight for the participating reader” (Draper 330). I have chosen paradoxes that provoke, hopefully, self-contemplation as in “One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.” This can trigger, I have hoped, self-reflection of his or her own understanding of an inner vital part of the self or lack thereof.

I have adopted the comic influence as a visual aesthetic. In Richard Peltz’ “Aesthetic Theory and Concrete Poetry: A Test Case” he asserts that “a concrete poem…represents a deliberate denial by its creator of what a poem is thought to be” (Peltz 27). Although to some extent it may be perceived I have overtly “denied” any tradition formula of creating a poem, I have not forsaken the value and worth of the process in creating it. I have used the images of question marks as poetic narratives themselves that supplement the textual paradoxes not simply and coincidence, but rather, as an intended purpose.  Pineda in her discussion of concrete poetry claims that “different elements are taken from different systems and incorporated into a completely new experience,” to create a new form of poetry (Pineda 380). I have encompassed a comic strand as an attachment to poetry in an attempt to create this new found “experience” absent before or otherwise neglected in the past. “Paradox” is a confrontation of my understanding of paradoxes. I, much as society, am an infant to the nature of paradoxes, and I have tried to projects such belief through the pinkish color.   

            Ultimately, my goal was to create a graphic poetry that is just as playful as to the nature of paradoxes and their existence. Life is absorbed in a flood of paradoxes, and therefore, in a flood of uncertainties. Paradoxes are interesting, spark curiosity, but inevitably, create and offer a sense of instability to truth. Can truth every be truly known when it lies within the uncertainty of a paradox?