A Critical Analysis of Illuminated Poems

Illuminated Poems as a Literary, Visual, and Cultural Site of Media Contestation

Introduction

This paper deals with an interdisciplinary approach to paintings and drawings that the NYC based artist Eric Drooker selected and created as a visual response to thirty-four poems by Allen Ginsberg. It views the publication Illuminated Poems as a democratic site of visual,literary and cultural contestation. After a short historical account of illustrated works in the realm of literary publications, I will give a brief introduction to the artistic cooperation between Allen Ginsberg and Eric Drooker, which will be followed by an analysis of two poems and two illustrations. The first poem, "War Profit Litany", was published in 1967 and illustrated by Drooker in 1996 as a visual commentary and ideological continuation of Ginsberg's anti-war poem. It will be my goal here to focus on the media specificity of a reprinted single-block-print-engraving in conjunction with the media specificity of a printed poem. Moreover, I would like to compare my findings to a second work by Drooker, a silent picture-story that resonates with "New Stanza's for Amazing Grace," song lyrics that Ginsberg wrote in 1994 based on the popular early 19th century church song of the same title.

By analyzing the poems "War Profit Litany" and "New Stanza's for Amazing Grace" (1994) as well as the illustrations by Eric Drooker, I will show that an engagement with the works cannot only serve as a dialogue between the visual and the verbal, but they also need to be viewed in the light of "transparent immediacy" (Bolter 2000, 21). In the concluding section of this paper I would like to propose that while poetry seems to have undergone a crisis in the written medium, the abundant repurposing and remediation of poetry since the 1990s have marked a turning point for poetry towards an intermedia art form--or at least one that is interwoven into a discourse about contemporary media.

1) Visual Illustrations in the Context of Different Genres and Media

In his book Illustration, the U.S. American literary critic J. Hillis Miller defines the word illustration as follows: "[i]llustration--the word means bringing to light, as a spelunker lights up a cave, or as a medieval manuscript is illuminated"(Miller 1992, 61). But just as Miller does not stick to a metaphoric description and asks himself about the function of illustrations, I would similarly like to consider visual illustrations as a critical agency that yields insight into the creative conjunction between practises of the visual arts and the literary arts. Despite the frequent assumption that poems are particularly suited for illustrations due to their brevity and poignant imagery, illustrations do not pertain to any particular genre. Viewed in a historical context, there have been numerous illustrations of poetic works, most prominently William Blake's Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1793-1794), which he produced in collaboration with his wife Catherine Boucher. Whether as drawings, engravings, paintings or photography, illustrations have played an important role in U.S. publications, as documented in Donald Hall's edited book, The Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children's Poems (2001). They have also played an important role in 18th century political pamphlets in the U.S.A. as well as in Europe--frequently in the form of caricatures. With 19th century novels, such as by Mark Twain and Henry James, illustrations had reached an enormous popularity amongst a wider readership, which was fostered by improvements in the publishing industry. The 19th century had also seen a wide range of cartoons in newspapers and according to Brian Walker, by "the mid-1890s, all the important innovations in comic strip format and publishing were in place" (Walker 2004, 10). As for a contemporary context, the twentieth century and twenty-first centuries mark yet another turning point with the widespread popularity of comics, manga, cartoons and, most recently, digital animation movies.

Moreover, an increasing number of graphic novels that incorporate visual story telling show that the visual alone can be used as an artistic tool for narrative communication. In the preface to Illuminated Poems, Allen Ginsberg mentions for example "pre-Hitler block print wordless novels by Frans Masareel and Lynd Ward" (Drooker 1996, xii). The dominance of visuals does not pertain to the arts world alone but is now considered a cultural phenomena often refered to as the "pictorial turn." According to W.J.T. Mitchell, who coined this term, it has become more and more difficult "to keep visuality and visual images out of the study of language and literature" (Mitchell 542). Given the increasing number of illustrated books, film adaptations of literary works, or remediated digital poetry, a critical engagement with the literary, the visual, and the sonic, poses one of the great new challenges of "literary'"analysis. Most recently, the pictorial turn has been fostered by the advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, as Jay David Bolter suggests in the chapter "The Breakout of the Visual" in his book Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Although animated graphics in conjunction with the World Wide Web have become very frequent, it is important to note that there is often no strict division between the digital and the analogue, as for example Alison Bechdel's book Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) suggests. This book was produced and edited with the programs Photoshop and Illustrator and can be characterized as a digitally produced, graphic narrative in hardcover bookform. Viewed in a historic light it is not peculiar here that the visual has accommodated itself as a narrative tool in a traditional (but also changing) medium.

However, what will be my concern here in this paper is the dialogic juxtaposition of two traditional media, the visual and the written that relate to each in one media environment in order to gain insight into the more complex relationship of poetry and new media in the early 21st century.

2) Allen Ginsberg & Eric Drooker: Illuminated Poems (1996)

In 1994 the New York City based artist Eric Drooker won the American Book Award with his first book Flood! A Novel in Pictures. His drawings, cartoons, graphics, and painting first appeard in leftist magazines, such as The People's Daily World, The Progressive, and the underground magazine Screw. Meanwhile they appeared occasionally in The Nation and Newsweek, and he is most famously known for his cover contributions to The New Yorker. In his second book Illuminated Poems (1996), which will be my focus here, Drooker puts thirty-four poems that Allen Ginsberg wrote between 1948 and 1992 into a visual context; likewise he places his paintings and drawings next to a verbal poetic discourse. In a few cases he does not engage in a direct work process by painting, drawing or engraving his work as a reponse to the poem at hand. In some instances he chose previously produced paintings, such as the ones that he made as a cover for The New Yorker between 1994 and 1996 and matched them up with poems by Ginsberg that would resonate one way or the other with the poem's content. In an interview with Goodmann, Drooker comments on the selection and creation of his paintings:

"one of the nice things about poetry is that it conjures up an image in the reader's mind--you're getting your own image, rather than simply some artist's interpretation of it. So I don't call them illustrations. I call them 'illuminations'--they're pictures that relate in some way to the subject matter. The pictures somehow vibrate with the words."

Important to note, this resonance between the written text and the image applies to all the paintings and drawings that Drooker made. Even though the term "illumination," as Drooker understands it, points to a separate potential of the visual art, I would like to propose to view his work as a special form of illustrations. If employed in a critical way, illustrations always have the potential to enlighten their viewer. Even though illustrations usually strike up a thematic synergy with the written text, they can also pose a commentary or a critique of the written text, or add a new dimension to it. Thus, in the thirty-four illustrations the visual and verbal message are negotiated in one media- technological space, in other words, on the same page. In Drooker's case the image does not simple pose an accessory to the written text. As Bruce Andrews puts it, "[s]pace--and the space of meaning and sense--isn't just a projection, or even a clearly marked subdivision. It becomes the staging ground for particular choices of trajectory, always on the move" (http://www.ubu.com/papers/andrews.html). Thus, in the following section I would like to analyze and provide a close reading of two poems and illustrations and focus on the relationship between the written medium as well as the visual medium as a powerful democratic site of literary, visual and cultural contestation.

2.1) "War Profit Litany" (1967/1996)

In Allen Ginsberg's poem "War Profit Litany," which the poet subversively dedicates to the poet (and controversial World War II figure) Ezra Pound, the speaker points to a meticulously collected list of the names of companies, industries, public institutions, politicans, and employees who all profited from the U.S.-American warfare between 1958 and 1968. The speaker underpins the scope and thus the gravity of the decade-long collaboration in a constant reference to these institutions and agencies, by continuoulsy opening his statements with phrases like "here listed," "these are," "names of," "separate listed," etc. Only the speaker's ambitious accounting is in the foreground, and it is up to the reader of the poem to come up with the names, which are only visible to the speaker of the poem. Likewise, the speaker does not refer to the Vietnam War explicitly, which evokes a potentially broader military involvement of the U.S.A. during that time period.

In a strong contrast to this referential openness one finds detailed descriptions of specific actions and deeds carried out by the collaborators of war. For example, in lines 5-7 the speaker states poignantly and emphatically that "[t]hese corporations have profited by merchandising skinburning / phosphorus or shells fragmented to thousands of / fleshpiercing needles." Over the sober process of bookkeeping, precise images of cruel deeds emerge, which are brought into causative juxtaposition. In the following example, the causal relationship is expressed through parallelism:

here are the names of their ambassadors to the Capital, representatives to legislature, those who sit drinking in hotel lobbies to persuade and separate listed, those who drop Amphetamines with military, gossip, argue and persuade (ll. 16-19).

In these lines, casual deeds by politicians are brought into a critical light: while state representatives consume alcohol in hotel lobbies, somewhere else the military is being supplied with amphetamines. Moreover, the poem concludes with a factual reference that "the first form of this litany begun first day December 1967 / furthers this poems of these States" (36-37). These two lines are characterized by its telegraphic shortness, which is achieved through the omission of pronouns, articles and auxiliary verbs as well as a by a conspicious rhythm; spondaic stress of the syllables, alliterations and plosive sounds evoke the impression of mechanical keystrokes from a typewriter. Based on the poignant brevity in the speaker's utterance, which resembles a military and administrative jargon, it becomes clear that the speaker has armed himself with the same weapons. However, the subtext of these lines reveals a second message--a lament. Whereas Walt Whitman's long additive lines in free verse were yet able to celebrate the U.S.A. in all its diversity, it may be suggested here that the warefare of the U.S.A. has also had its influence on its poets, who now compose war profit litanies.

I would now like to turn to the function of the reprinted engraving by Eric Drooker. The picture, which elsewhere Drooker calls "Oil Wars," does not carry a title in this publication. As such, it is subsumed even more into the context of the poem. Contrary to the factual reference in Ginsberg's poem, Drooker has chosen in his work--which is typical for the visual arts--only one location in his symbol-laden picture that refers to a different political and cultural context, indicated by the half-moon and the mosque, namely the First Iraq War. Thus, an interpretive look at the picture reveals that Drooker continues the accounting that Ginsberg began in 1958 by yet another three decades. There are buildings visible in the left background and in the right half of the picture there are seven oil towers, implicitly laying bare the reason for the attack. Moreover, the center-piece of the image shows the bombardment of a mosque through gas-mask-carrying flight-dragons, which not only destroys the emblematic cultural and religious site but also kills human beings. Most importantly, the part that most directly corresponds to the poem "War Profit Litany" is the outer frame that is spiked with logos from U.S.American companies. From DuPont to Exxon, Mobil, McDonalds, Ford, General Motors to Microsoft and IBM, Drooker does not omit any company that has not dominated the American as well as the global economy in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, he also includes the media into his overt critique by including the acronym "abc" at the bottom of the right margin, which stands for American Broadcasting Corporation. Thus, Drooker makes visually explicit what Ginsberg only indexically refers to. Or, put otherwise, hypertextually links to the reader's mind. But also Drooker works subversively, as the serpentine convolution on the frame does not pose a mere decoration, but rather two leaking gas pumps that--not only literally speaking--add fuel to the fire. It becomes clear that both works, Drooker's engraving as well as Ginsberg's poem work within the same ideological framework and achieve this by means of their chosen medium.

Shifting to a media perspective, I would now like to address yet another important aspect of Drooker's painting, and that is "transparent immediacy"--a term that Jay David Bolter introduces in his book Remediation. Understanding New Media (cf. Bolter 2000, 23). As he puts it, "a transparent interface would be one that erases itself, so that the user is no longer aware of confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium." (Bolter 2000, 24) This characteristic, which has become a prominent feature for many new media works, is evoked (while at the same time subverted) in Eric Drooker's analogue work. The flight-dragon seemingly flies out of the picture towards the viewer--threateningly with a bomb in its claws. This effect is achieved by having the dragon set off from its background and having its wings overlap with and transgress the level of the picture frame, which produces a trompe l'oeil effect. Thus, while the picture certainly is characterized by its evoked spatial depth through the white and black contrast, it simultaneously seems to transgress its own medium while threatening to enter the viewer's reality.

To conclude my first analysis here, I would like to sketch a short theoretical account of a potential dialogue between the depicted poem and the picture. According to the media philospher Vilem Flusser, a picture synchronizes a topic that it tries to convey as a scene. After a first glance, the viewer's eye and her mind has to wander over the surface of the picture in order to grasp its full interpretation. By doing so, she has to diachronize its synchronicity; in other words, she provides a narrative for what she sees happening in the picture (cf. Flusser 2002, 24). By contrast, Allen Ginsberg's poem is a verbal, poetic account of a list of human beings, institutions, and events that the reader is left to follow (or not) in her thoughts and imagination. Anyone who has ever read or heard Ginsberg's poetry would most likely agree that his verbal imagery--especially if sounded out--involves many (if not all) senses, which is perhaps the most striking quality of verbal communication. Moreover, as Bruce Andrews suggests, this thought-process is interestingly linked to a social situation: "The words don't 'make images'. They implicate situations (which are social, and which are treated as social, in a more critical way)" (http://www.ubu.com/papers/andrews. html). As has been pointed out, the illustration, or illumination, as Drooker calls it, does not supply a mere decoration, rather Ginsberg's critique of the U.S. war regime is taken up visually by the artist, underpinning the political rhetoric of both works. In both cases a deciphering of the content belongs into the mental realm of the recipient who deals with each medium based on his or her cultural training. Thus, eventhough it is frequently assumed that poems often evoke visual images that are conveyed through the medium of verbal language and words are frequently used to describe visual images, I would like to propose that both media as they are employed here are clearly agencies for a critical social discourse that is multi-sensual. As Mitchell states, "[v]erbal imagery, moreover, can involve all the senses, or it may involve no sensory component at all, sometimes suggesting nothing more than a recurrent abstract idea like justice or grace or evil" (Mitchell 13). Similarly, the engraving at hand shows not only a visual battlefield, weaving in cultural texts from advertisement, but also evokes sound in the viewer's multi-sensorial mind, when looking at the bombardment, for example. This process gains complexity by putting both works side by side. Both media--the written and the visual (which in this publication make use of the same media-technology to store and distribute the work) bear their independent message that is negotiated by the reader.

In the following section of this paper I would like to shift my focus to analyzing a sequence of pictures in conjunction with poetry, which on the one hand points to the narrative quality of sequential images, and on the other hand raises further important questions about possible dialogues between different media.

2.2) "New Stanzas for Amazing Grace" (1994/1996)

In a non-verbal comic strip constisting of six panels, Eric Drooker creates a short sequence of scenes in the life of a beggar, which is brought into context with the content of a poem--or rather song lyrics--by Allen Ginsberg, written in a conventional iambic meter with an abab rhyme scheme. In the first stanza of the lyrics, which also contains the refrain, the speaker tells about a dream he had, in which he found himself as a homeless person exposed to ignorant looks by people, who "passed with eyes of stone" (l. 4). The second stanza reveals the speaker's request to homeless people that they would at least accept "a smile or word" as a "change"--referring to a change in the human exchange between beggars and passersby, have-nots and haves. Moreover, change refers to a monetary exchange, whereby the buyer is left with smaller bank notes or coins after a purchase. In the third stanza the speaker encourages working men to at least provide a smile as a friendly gesture, rather than feeling ashamed and looking away, if they cannot donate money, not even "a dime" (l. 10). The last stanza, which is then followed by the refrain, utters hope that homeless people will receive amazing grace--very much like in the original version of the popular church song from the early 19th century. As for the idea of the adaptation of the song lyrics, Ginsberg states in an introduction to a live performance of the song:

"mine came from Anne Waldman, poet, who [was going] on a sesshin...with a dozen other Zen students on the Bowery. Seven days on the Bowery with only one dollar a day to find their own food and their own shelter. That was very difficult in the cold winter; card board not very warm to sleep in. But the worst suffering was not getting food and shelter but that people were not even looking at you, that you felt alienated, rejected by the rest of the human race, no longer human, this some sort of thing sitting on the corner alone in a great solitude, ignored by the rest of the community, who had it good. So that was the great suffering of the homeless on the street. So I wrote these "New Stanzas for Amazing Grace"
(Transcript of Ginsberg's introduction to his performance of Amazing Grace).

Thus, Ginsberg's text "New Stanzas for Amacing Grace," which is captured on the written page in the publication by Drooker, stands in an indirect intertextual relationship to its remediated audio version. Ginsberg is not only known for having made frequent comic drawings himself, but he was predominantely also a performance poet and had his poems recorded on numerous CDs. The audio version of "New Stanzas of American Grace" doubtlesslsy also provides a more immediate experience of the content of the song to its listener.

If one now views the picture story in the context of the poem – without preferencing one medium over the other--it becomes obvious that Drooker did not follow the content of the poem in a coherent way, such as by creating one panel for each stanza. In fact, in a personal e-mail correspondence with the artist he states that his picture story precedes Ginsberg's song lyrics: "I was hanging out with Ginsberg one evening in 1995, and I showed him my sequence of the homeless guy I'd recently drawn for The New Yorker Magazine. He suggested it be used as an illustration for 'New Stanzas by Amazing Grace' for the book we were collaborating on" (Eric Drooker, 23 June, 2007). Both works bear a striking resemblance in the way they convey their message. With each darkening panel, the picture story tries to evoke more and more empathy for the homeless man. The sychnronized positioning of the content of the first four panels evokes a dynamic form or reading, which enhances the dramaturgic effect. Just like the refain brings in a repetitive and thus emphatic quality, the panels too seem to multiply in their order of reading--although a conventional linearity brings the story to a climactic end.

I would now like to briefly turn to what is happening in the picture story. A beggar sits in front of a city building, holding his hand out unobtrusively to busy passersby. Whereas the shoe of a man who is dressed in a suave suit still bears some hope, it becomes clear through the second panel that the high heels of the shoes of a woman, just like the shoes of the man, will also pass by without stopping. This impression of movement is on the one hand achieved because the man has already almost left the setting; on the other hand, the gesticulating posture of the beggar adds to this effect. His disappointed look follows the man, which can be re-enacted through the viewer.

Furthermore, in panel three and four a special effect is achieved since the two halves of a man, who is holding an equally "cut-up" newspaper under his arms, move optically into each other. One's gaze moves from right to left, in order to match up the two separate pictures in a timed process. This evokes--but can never fulfill--the notion of motion. The more people move into the pictures like a curtain, the more pressing the gesture of the beggar becomes. In panel five he only poses a skeleton, which tries to stretch out his hands to the reader. Similar to the effect of the illustration for "War Profit Litany" this visual technique creates the feeling of a hightened immediacy. In panel six a crowd of briefcase-carrying people cover up the beggar so much that his fate can only be deduced. Interesting to note, the space in between the panels, which according to Scott McCloud, "comic afficionaods have named 'the gutter'", is the staging ground for the human imagination, which "takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea" (66). Based on what Grunewald suggests in his article "Das Prinzip Bildgeschichte" ("The Principle Picture Story"), the work can be characterized as a narrow sequence, since the action from panel to panel proceeds relatively fast, i.e. from moment to moment (cf. also McCloud 70). This establishes the rhythm of the reading experience, which is quite contrastively played out in the lyrics by Ginsberg on a sound level, where each stanza is characterized by alternating rise and fall in the melody, followed by an equal pause until a new stanza one is resumed. The rise-and-fall pattern accentuates the melody's soundscape that is furthermore accompanied by a guitar and violins. While the listener is bound to hearing the song in its presented order, the viewer's eye rests on each panel--perhaps due to her empathy for the beggar--before she engages in an overall cross-reading of the panels. Interesting to note, the sequential visual approach fits the formal structure of the poem; just like in "War Profit Litany," the single black-and-white graphic echoes the layout of its poetic counterpart.

Conclusion

In the concluding section of this paper I would like to come back to the concept of immediacy in the context of remediating poetry. For that matter it may be important to note that Allen Ginsberg himself attributed quite a potential to the quality of new media for a changing poetry audience in the 1990s. He views Drooker's paintings as an adept means for making his poetry accessible to a younger TV generation that--as has oftentimes been critically remarked--is more used to short attention spans and less focused on detail or depth. Ginsberg states:

I was flattered that so radical an artist of later generations found the body of my poetry still relevant, even inspiring. I was curious to see how he would interpret my work. And I thought that with today's lowered-attention-span TV consciousness, this would be a kind of updating of the presentation of my work for the 90's
(Ginsberg quoted in Goodman 1996).

That this remark is not necessarily a marketing trick may be confirmed by Ginsberg's participation in a number of video clips, such as in The United States of Poetry project, which not only produced video clips of dozens of U.S.-American poets, but also broadcasted them via PBS. Since the 1990s, poetry film festivals, such as the International Zebra Award, which took place in Berlin, Germany, in 2002, 2004, and 2006 have demonstrated that poems are becoming more and more integrated in new media environments, which pose the staging ground for a verbal, visual, and sonic poetic experience. Even though Ginsberg's and Drooker's seemingly traditional collaboration bears a long media history of using paper as a reproductive means for the oral, the written and the visual, I believe that they foreshadow poetry films and hypermedia poems as highly reflective agencies of the media change and media convergence that have taken place during the past decade in South America, North America, Europe, and many other parts of this world.

Thus, it is also not surprising that Drooker has recently remediated his work in yet another form by making it available on the Internet in a more immediate way. He used the software program Adobe Flash to animate his picture story, which he calls "The Crowd" and added Arabic music to it. The transition of the individual panels in this animation is timed and linearly programmed, accommodating it for the digital space through media convergence and putting the comic strip into an extended political and cultural context. As for a comparison to the media specificity of its analogue counterpart, it would be possible to argue with Scott McCloud here who states that "the basic difference is that animation is sequential in time but not spatially juxtaposed as comics are" (McCloud 7). But the situation seems more complex to me since in contrast to its analogue counterpart here the sequence becomes only seemingly more filmic: each panel is in a transitional phase until the next one takes the space of the previous panel, creating a regular visual rhythm that is reinforced by the poignant accentuation of the Arabic music.

To conclude, despite what may be considered an "update" of Ginsberg's poems by Eric Drooker, it is also fair to say that neither the paintings by Drooker, nor Ginsberg's poems replace each other in this publication; poetry, after all, as W.T.J. Mitchell points out, "strives to outdo vividness and immediacy" (Mitchell 25). Yet, I would argue, poetry can also no longer be viewed out of the context of other remediated versions and the current media discourse surrounding media change and media convergence.

Bibliographical reference

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