LSA and Reductos

The last week has been utterly crazy driving up and down California visiting friends. I spent last weekend at the Linguistics Society of America conference, where I randomly ran into my TA from the first linguistics class I ever took back seven years ago at Berkeley. One of the sessions spurned a fairly good brainstorm for my visual grammar project. Now that I'm in a psychology program I was left thinking only "now how can I do this in an experiment?" I think I have a good idea for how, but we'll see what my profs think when I get back to Boston.

In other news, Grant Thomas has taken the "Reducto" graphic poem type proposed in my Comixpedia article and is applying it in a series of poems. It's fun to see someone playing with the ideas actively, so go check it out!

New Article: Visual Poetry

Flatteringly ask and you shall receive: After a bit of a haitus, I finally have a new Comic Theory 101 article up Comixpedia entitled "Visual Poetry."

Expanding on my riff on poetry from the last article I did on "Seeing Rhymes," this one explores what a formal visual poetic structure might be like. Throughout the piece I construct a new "poetic trope" based on some theoretical principles. For those curious, I literally made up the poem and its characteristics as I wrote the piece, no planning whatsoever.

Actually, the main reason it took so long to finish was that I had to draw the examples, and drawing time is hard to come by these days. It's an okay example, but I imagine (hope?) more people will take up the idea and run with it better than I did.

See! See! My theories can be applied to practice too!

"Comic" Theory 101: Seeing Rhymes

At long last, I finally have a new "Comic" Theory 101 article up at Comixpedia. This one delves into the possibilities of "visual rhyming" and how we can play with it in practice, particularly in visual poetry.

For those who are curious, the first two examples come from a piece I did waaaaay back in 1998 called "Life is where Love is" that has yet to be posted online (though its in the Meditations book already). The large pages, of course, are from my La Belle Dame Sans Merci adaptations, the second version of which is being serialized twice a week. The final poem is brand new for the article.