Poetry Comics

by Dave Morice

The following text was adapted from the book How To Make Poetry Comics by Dave Morice. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1994. Copyright 1983 by Dave Morice.

Using Creative Materials in the Classroom

A few years ago a friend of mine said to me, “Great poems should paint pictures in the mind.” Jokingly I replied, “Great poems would make great cartoons.”

The following week I went to Oskaloosa, Iowa, to conduct a Poets-in-the-Schools (PITS) program for grade school and junior high students. By day we talked about epic poetry, surrealism, and other topics; by night I sat in my hotel room sketching out an eight-page comic strip of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

When I showed the poem-cartoons to friends—poets and non-poets alike—they responded merrily to this mutation of verse. Some suggested that I print up copies and send them to other writers.

In July 1979, I published the first issue and sent it out to other writers and editors. The readers enjoyed seeing the muse toppled from the pedestal, and several fellow poets offered their works for “cartoonization.”

I decided to take some of the poem-cartoons with me to a PITS program in Des Moines, to see how they would work in teaching poetry. To start off, I read Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” to a seventh-grade class. Unfamiliar with the poem’s style, a few students stretched or yawned, a couple of them whined.

“Now I’d like to show you a magazine called Poetry Comics. In it, you’ll find the same poem in a cartoon strip. The words are Wordsworth’s, the drawings are mine.”

The students looked puzzled that anyone, especially a visiting poet, would be handing out comic books in class. They were even more suprised to see “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” spoken by a cloud wandering on human legs.

Some students nudged each other, some started to laugh cautiously, not certain if that was proper. Then, it dawned on them. Enjoying poetry this way was okay.

Here’s an example of what you can do with comics and a poem:

Now try writing your own poetry comics by following these simple directions for the “Rorschach Test” Cartoon Exercise….

Let the forms determine the content by looking at the ink blots in each panel for a few seconds. Then write down the first short phrase that comes to mind. When you’ve done this with all six panels, write a poem of ten or more lines and include all six phrases.

You can learn more about Morice’s ideas on poetry and comics by looking at his books How to Make Poetry Comics, More Poetry Comics, Poetry Comics: An Animated Anthology, and The Adventures of Dr. Alphabet.