Poetry is in the Air

Where to ideas come from?

Hello, Seasonal Observers!

One thing I’ve discovered since embarking. on this weird journey of becoming a public poet and comic artist is that poetry can be found anywhere and everywhere.

Today’s post is a short one. I have a haiku comic from the archives, a short thought fragment, and, of course, this week’s haiku prompt. (Also please excuse the sound quality. Due to time constraints, it’s even rougher than usual.)

crabs can see the stars
do they dream of swimming in
the celestial sea?

Poetry is in the Air

In the past three days, I’ve been asked a dozen or so times where I get my ideas for poems and comics. The first thought that always pops into my head, one that I never utter, is, “I don’t know.”

That thought holds both truth and lie.

Ideas show up unbidden throughout the day. Some ideas are fully formed, but most are like this micro-essay, rough and fragmented. Often, I can trace a poem or comic idea back to a number of sources.

Many poems come directly from my observations while out walking in nature or around my town.

Other times ideas come from the deep recesses of my subconscious, planted there by gods, demons, the muses, or fate.

Poetry is in the air.

I know exactly where today’s poetry comic came from. I happened upon an article that marine biologists had concluded that crabs have the ability to see the stars in the night sky, and were working on a theory as to why that would be helpful to a crab.

Right there I saw a killer opening line for a haiku, something true and provocative, crabs can see the stars.

The rest of the poem immediately followed.

The Phillip K. Dick story, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is, for reasons unclear to me, always close to the surface of my conscious and unconscious mind. Perhaps because it is the greatest book title in the history of publishing.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep morphed into do they dream of swimming in the celestial sea.

The illustrations flowed from the haiku. At the time, I was primarily working with public-domain images and combining them with my hand-drawn backgrounds. During this period, I frequently cut out old black-and-white pictures of starfish and used them as stars in the skies. I used that trick again here, only this time I colored the stars with shades of orange and yellow, digitally made them more dynamic by warping them slightly, and laid them out in wave patterns against the dark night.

I found a few promising pictures of crabs in the public domain, mostly black-and-white, and recolored all of them with colors of crabs I had seen in my frequent forays to various beaches on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

I wanted the crabs to each look isolated and wistful, as much as crabs can look wistful.

For the final panel, I freed the crabs to swim in the sky among the sea stars, overlaying the ocean I had used in the earlier panels and making it mostly transparent, giving the last panel more of an ocean feel.

Right now, I’m laying out the process in a logical, rational manner. But this is misleading.

The images and ideas for the comic just came to me. I didn’t plan anything. I just did what I was feeling. I felt the illustrations and used whatever skills I had to bring that feeling to life, or more accurately to bring a facsimile of that feeling to life.

Where do ideas come from? I don’t know. They come from everywhere and nowhere.

Poetry is in the air, all you have to do is tune your body to the right frequency. You can feel the poetry in the room with you right now if you are willing to stop thinking.

Where do ideas come from? I know. They come from everywhere and nowhere.

Poetry is in the air, all you have to do is open your senses. You can see, hear, taste, and smell the poetry in the room with you right now if you’re willing to stop thinking.

Poetry is in the air.

Haiku Prompt

Write a haiku related to something you have seen online in the past 24 hours. Don’t think too hard about it. Go with the first thing idea that pops into your mind when you ask yourself what have you seen online recently.

Please share your haiku in the comments below!

Be the poetry you want to see in the world.

Cheers,

Jason