Aaron McCollough

I ENDURE

• Home

I do this I do that I talk about this other thing…

Posted on May 27, 2007 - Filed Under , | 1 Comment

For a long time, I’ve been kind of skeptical about “graphic novels.” I’ve had *many* friends who were big fans. They’ve encouraged me to loosen up and give comics a chance. For years, however, I’ve held back. My friends have tried to get me to do lots of things over the years. Often those things got me in trouble. Might comics not also get me in trouble? After all, I have poetry to read and secondary sources to digest. Aren’t comics going to distract me. Also, I’m about as nerdy as I care to be already. Will comics not aggravate this blemish? In any case, I gave in. Say the zodiac was properly aligned for it, whatever. I read Watchmen. Then I read From Hell. Then I read some other ones. Now, as I do always, I think: “ok…what does this have to do with what I think about.” I was talking with Arda the other day about something gutcult related. We need poets talking about cultural artifacts, she said. Or she said something close to that. We don’t use “words,” technically speaking (but that’s the subject for another post). In any case, the gist of what she was pushing my way via breath and vibration was that gutcult should concern itself more with poets reading things like music, movies, comix, etc. as poets. That is to say, not using words. Maybe I’ll elaborate on “not using words” in another post (as I already implied above). So poets need to be doing poet-work on culture in gutcult. Yes, totally, I thought and expressed (I think). In fact, when I was initially thinking about what gutcult would be (4ish years ago) I was thinking it should do something more like that. Hence, the “cult” in gutcult. As things developed, I found it very difficult to get poets to do this kind of writing (at least for free and for a web journal and and and). So, I went for just the poems. Part of Arda’s point was that we all (all us poets) whinge about the waning cultural presence of poetry, but we don’t do much to explain the nature of the graft always occuring between what we do and punk rock, avant garde viz art, etc. Neither Arda nor I was deceived that this was a totally new thought, nor were we ignorant of numerous attempts to connect the dots. Rather, we were thinking it again. Saying it again. And we would like to try again.

So how does a poet do his/her work with this: from meathaus.com

Comments