The poetry gutter

I am hungry for writing. My metaphorical stomach is growling.

Grrrr….

Instead, I have been baking bread and riding the bus and riding my bike and picking up the car at the mechanic's and watering the garden and hanging out on the floor of the basement bathroom with the cat and driving the cat back to the vet to check on suspicious symptoms and applying warm compresses and giving medicine to the cat and putting the new, larger, harder cone collar back on the cat and drinking wine and reading about comics.

The book is Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, by Scott McCloud. I didn't realize that comics were invisible; I've always found them to be quite visual and therefore visible—but maybe the book will explain this. I'm reading it for work (!), and I haven't finished it yet, but I have learned something:

That space between the panels is called the gutter, and it's very important because that space is what kicks the imagination into gear. The mind must fill the gap, make the transition between panels, to "connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality."

I read that, and I thought, "Wow, that's like poetry!"

We have the obvious spaces, or gutters, between the stanzas, and the mind or the imagination must make its own connection between them is required. Even when a line carries across a stanza break, the mind must still stretch to understand the significance of that space.

But a poem often contains spaces within a stanza, even within a line, places where the mind must fill in the gaps in its own way. Or spaces where the mind must reconcile the idea of the gap—that it's there and it won't be filled in.

I hadn't looked at it that way before.

And I think there are also books that combine poetry and comics (you probably know of some—do you?). Maybe I should check those out next.