On the one hand, while panels on comics at MLA in recent years have explored how individuals from underrepresented groups both create and are depicted in comics form, those panels have privileged narrative, often memoir, comics. This panel follows the trajectory of panels like “Graphic Resistance: Comics and Social Protest” by examining how comics travel and how creators repurpose them for political ends. On the other hand, while recent poetry studies panels have included the treatment of diverse archives through diverse methodologies, they have tended to include presenters from similar discursive communities. For example, at last year’s convention, two major poetry sessions—“Twenty-First-Century Approaches to American Poetry and Poetics” and “American Poetry in the Twenty-First Century: New Approaches”—were structured around contributor publications for volumes by Wiley-Blackwell and Cambridge UP respectively, showing, perhaps, an overfocus on standard academic approaches. Viewing poetry through the lens of comics suggests a more heterogeneous combination of voices that approach poetry from the standpoint of popular culture, collaboration, and vernacular modes of making.

Indeed, the three panelists, at different stages of their careers, blur the boundary between practitioner and scholar: they are poets, cartoonists, editors, artists, and educators. Their contributions suggest how we might draw on diverse forms of expertise to reconstruct our profession, how creating can produce knowledge, and about how both scholarship and creative work have transformed and can be transformed in the age of new media.

Yona Harvey begins by comparing mainstream poetry publishers’ slow acceptance of visual poems, once considered “amateurish” or confined to the DIY chapbook realm, to a similar skepticism of zines, a close relative of comics that was historically viewed as insignificant, or “for teens only” in the eyes of the uninformed. Harvey will examine the underground style of humor in Douglas Kearney’s poems and in Matthea Harvey’s If the Tabloids Are True What Are You, highlighting the value of visual, textual, and collage intersections in poetry and zines.

Jessica Q. Stark’s analysis of excerpts of The Class of ’47, a collaborative, poetry comics book by Joe Brainard and Robert Creeley, similarly questions how we establish an object as art, a text as poetry, books as “books.” Stark considers how poets deploy previously circulated images to problematize the idea of linear seriality and narrative closure in “life writing.” Stark suggests that The Class of ‘47 examines iterative failure as an inherent quality of being human: one that binds their disparate autobiographies, popular icons, and lyrical repetitions into one, holistic exercise—a poem—in “life writing” that resists normative expectations.

Finally, Jessica Sperry Steinorth discusses how hybrid forms arising from documentary poetics and new materialism can be leveraged to penetrate silence, from her perspective as creator of Her Read: A Graphic Poem, a radical remodel of Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art (1931). In Steinorth’s book-length erasure poem, she uses correction fluid, scalpel and embroidery floss to excavate a first-person female voice from the words of the male critic examining male bodies of work. Exploring process-driven and performative elements of visual poetry in her work and that of others, Steinorth proposes that hybrid forms can increase agency, expand inclusivity, and subvert hegemonic narratives.

Through their attention to the interplay of image and text within poetry, all three call attention to materiality, circulation, and artistic value. The concerns of this panel would appeal to multiple groups active at MLA in addition to the Creative Writing Forum and Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum, such as Poetry and Poetics; 20th-21st Century; Visual Culture; Book History, Print Culture, and Lexicography; Popular Culture; and Women’s and Gender Studies. We look forward to the conversation these talks will generate and to how they will impact future dialogue about comics, poetry, materiality, and transdisciplinary creative and scholarly academic labor.