Poetry Friday: The Poem as Comic Strip (”Recitative” by A.E. Stalling, illustrated by Kikuo Johnson)
Today’s Poetry Friday roundup is at Big A little a.
I’ve raved elsewhere and on many occasions about Kids Can Press’s Visions in Poetry series, which features classic poems illustrated 
by contemporary artists - poems such as The Raven, Casey at the Bat, The Highwayman, and Jabberwocky! This week, I was supremely excited when I discovered another admirable effort to bring great poetry to life with amazing illustrations.
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is host to an ongoing series called “The Poem as Comic Strip”:
Heightened language—one possible or partial definition of poetry—isn’t the first thing one associates with comics. Yet comic book artists take into account the way words appear on the page to a degree poets will find familiar. How many lines should accompany each image? How high should the dialogue balloon float? The ratio of printed words to blank space plays a role in whether a poem or strip succeeds.
The best of the daily humor strips (think Peanuts) have produced thousands of word-and-picture episodes that occupy about the same thought-space as a good short poem; the terseness can resemble haiku. As a way to help readers discover (or rediscover) our archive, poetryfoundation.org has invited some of today’s most vital graphic novelists to interpret a poem of their choice from the more than 4,500 poems in our archive, reaching from Beowulf to the present.
This month’s poem is “Recitative” by A.E. Stalling, illustrated by the Brooklyn-based Hawaii-raised illustrator Kikuo Johnson.
Every night, we couldn’t sleep.
Our upstairs neighbors had to keep
Dropping something down the hall—
A barbell or a bowling ball,
And from the window by the bed,
Alley cats expended breath
In arias of love and death.
Dawn again, across the street,
Jackhammers began to beat
Like hangovers, and you would frown—
That well-built house, why tear it down?
More Poems as Comic Strips:
#1: David Heatley and Diane Wakoski
#2: Gabrielle Bell and Emily Dickinson
#3: Jeffrey Brown and Russell Edson
#4: Ron Regé, Jr. and Kenneth Patchen
#5: Paul Hornschemeier and Ted Kooser
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