Research Town

A Memory poetry comic is a new format I first encountered at the Glasgow Zine Library, Glasgow Zine Fest in 2021. I was participating in the workshop, “I Hear You Here: A Poetry Comics Workshop” led by Peony Gent, who artfully explained what illustration means to her and her use of found poetry in her work.

At the Park (Fig.1) was the result of this workshop, my first memory poetry comic. Peony led us through a series of questions, first asking us to think of a memory, either in the recent past or longer ago. It could be anything at all, no matter how significant or how small. I immediately thought of a recent Spring day where we were at the park, helping my son Caelan to ride his pedal bike. Then Peony asked us to think back to our memory and write down in one sentence what we can see, what we can hear, what we can smell, what we can taste, and what we feel. After we had jotted these sentences Peony talked a bit about how to bring in the element of illustration–that it’s not necessarily about drawing a representation of what is written down, but that the images can represent other things in the memory–not said in the writing. We ran out of time in the workshop to complete our memory poetry comics, but we had been asked to make a note next to each sentence of things that were perhaps happening at the time of this memory around us, recalling elements where we could. I found a bit of time later in the day to draw my memory poetry comic, then after a bit of manipulation using Canva to add font styles to the text, I published it to my Instagram feed for the workshop participants to see.

I have been experimenting with this format of capturing a memory of an experience. The memory poetry comic provides snapshots of a moment which bring together the emotional individual perspective with the external surrounding and happenings. Figure 2 shows a working draft of a memory poetry comic made from my experiences of Manchester Bound Art Book Fair in 2021. Figures 3 and 4 show some of the process behind the sketch of the memory poetry comic of my memories of running through the woods during the Spartan Beast 2021, a half marathon distance obstacle course.