Poetry Comics—How Form Complements Material
An interview with collaborators Aakriti Karun and Anukriti Srivastava by Kristin LaFollette, Art Editor of Mud Season Review
Find their art in the issue here.
“It was a crazy game of guessing what she could’ve been thinking when she wrote the poem.”
—Anukriti Srivastava
In my time as Art Editor at Mud Season, we’ve never showcased a collaborative portfolio as our art feature. I’m so excited to have your work in this issue! Can you talk a bit about your creative partnership? How did that relationship develop and what other projects have you worked on together?
AS: Aakriti initially reached out to me to be a contributing artist on a mental health awareness program—I instantly agreed. From what I can tell, she’s always working on something new and creative. So the next time she had an idea for a hybrid piece, she reached out to me again and we got to working on illustrating her poem ‘Growing Pains.’ She was easy to work with—she gave me the creative freedom to contribute to the hybrid poem, instead of just having me as an illustrator. Our schedules haven’t permitted us to work on another project yet, but I hope that changes soon.
Building on the last question, what was it like collaborating on Growing Pains? What did each of you contribute to the project?
AK: I’d written the text of the piece around a year ago—it’s my shortest poem to date, hyper-compressed. The images blew it up. Anukriti created an extraordinary amount of space between each line: both logistically—where you’re scrolling and it’s not as condensed/overwhelming — and conceptually.
We worked in circles: since the text was already written, she’d send me image drafts for each line, and I’d tell her what they suggested to me. She’d revise the image and send it over again, and so on. It was as if my every response was an ekphrastic piece. There was a lot of translation going on: my responses were more analytical. She’d take those vague, abstract ideas and make them bleed through the panel. It was strange because the text was stagnant, and yet its meaning was changing and deepening with each draft in unpredictable ways. I wasn’t even working on the images myself—it was like I was projecting the creative process onto a screen and watching in awe as Anukriti brought it all together.
AS: Very refreshing since it gave me an opportunity to explore abstract and conceptual art — something I’d never tried before. Shreya’s writing style is unique and sharp, so it was both challenging and fun to illustrate her work. It was a crazy game of guessing what she could’ve been thinking when she wrote the poem, and then showing her the image asking, “Is this it?”An amazing feeling when it really was it.
As an artist and writer myself, I’m particularly interested in the intersections of image and text and how they create meaning beyond what is possible through only one medium. What inspired this hybrid image + text project?
AK: When we started this project, I’d been preoccupied with questions of form: what can poetry do that images can’t? What makes this material exclusive to a particular medium, and how can it make the most of it? I love hybrid work because it highlights how forms complement material. Especially true when the project is collaborative and the modes you think in are entirely different. There’s definitely an expansion of scope with regard to the mediums but also in your creative process.
I was first introduced to the concept of poetry comics through Gabrielle Bates and Bianca Stone’s work—I immediately made several imitative, failed attempts at drawing and put them away for good. When I saw Anukriti’s artwork some months later, I was drawn to how clear and objective it was, and the specificity of mood. There’s always a threat of too much abstraction and distance in my poetry, and I liked the idea of having emotive visual anchors. It reminded me that for all language can do, we still exist in, and have to deal with, the real world, and our real bodies.
What do you hope reader-viewers gain from this project? What does the title–Growing Pains–mean to you?
AS: When I first read it, I instantly resonated with the heavy blurry emotion of staying stuck in time while you grow up on the outside—all the muddled childish thoughts that never go away. The times I think of them most are when I’m vulnerable and alone. Waking up, getting dressed, brushing your teeth—mundane things you can’t escape or have company in.
Time is a consistent theme in the project, and there are so many interesting layers, shadows, and surreal objects throughout. What was the process of creating the digital images like?
AS: Mostly a fever dream. I tried to plan as little as possible, which led to a few trial and errors, but the results were just as organic and raw as I’d hoped they’d be. Before every frame, I’d have a discussion with Shreya regarding what she’s looking for (key elements) and I’d build on that. I should emphasize that I never followed a concrete method. I’d spend a few minutes scribbling doodles on my tablet before every frame to ease into the style. This was different from my other artwork, which was more realistic and less conceptual. I almost always worked on it late at night—I think that played a role, too.
I love the text on the last two panels that reads, “my teeth are well rooted. I miss not knowing whether they / are about to fall.” Talk about that text and how it works with and alongside the imagery.
AK: Those two lines encapsulate the key concerns of the poem for me—the horrifying predictability of adulthood. Waking up everyday to the same body, the same life. Along with this predictability is the acute awareness that time is slipping away when you can’t. When things don’t change, you stop seeing them. What happens when you can’t see yourself?
Images are immediate in a way text can’t be, and they stay in the eye for longer. I’m interested in how they both introduce and clarify the text. The images do a lot of the heavy-lifting here, so that the text can maintain the muted, defeated voice.
I like how Anukriti traced the transition from the girl’s interiority, which is gradually projected onto her surroundings, almost as if she is emptying herself. In the slide “my teeth are well-rooted,” the roots are on the sink, not the teeth. The girl herself is blurred, shadowy, as if she’s only part of the background. But in the next panel she’s pulled back, literally rooted into the drain. The last image is haunting to me because it feels more raw and physical than the previous ones. It gives me the sense of failure—the failure of self-erasure, which comes so easily in childhood.
What else are the two of you working on? Where can we find more of your (individual or collaborative) work?
AK: I’m working on a longer project for the first time—possibly a novel, though I don’t know whether it’ll go anywhere.
AS: I’ve worked on a hand-drawn stop motion video, and I’m currently working on another long term project alongside college. Let’s hope that works out! You can find all my art on my Instagram page @/anukriti_._
