CARTOONIST AND POET
Reading about the work of cartoonist Gary Larson and how he works I could not help compare and contrast his modus operandi and my own with respect to writing prose and poetry. Larson draws inspiration from similar sources to my own: interests, experiences and memories. He is sensitive about his readers and whether they understand his work. And so is this the case with me and my literary opus. I have one eye on my readers most of the time, but another on the world and all that is therein. Sometimes I shut one eye and open the other; at other times I open both eyes one, I like to think, to “the hallowed beauty of the Beloved.”
Both Larson and I like our work to speak for itself but, after years in classrooms explaining things to students, I am not bothered if I have to discuss my work. This, though, I rarely have to do. IÂ’m not popular enough to have to so engage my mental powers. Larson is never comfortable analysing his cartoons. We are both painstaking about making our work unambiguous. One interesting sub-set of his work is cartoons about cartoons and, for me, poems about poetry. Ideas for his work and mine can and do come from anywhere. Being a cartoonist is a solitary life as it is being a poet, but there are fewer really successful cartoonists. Few poets and few cartoonists get rich.-Ron Price with thanks to Jackie Morrissey in The Complete Far Side: Volume One: 1980-1986, by Gary Larson, Andrews McMeel Publishing, Kansas City, 2004, pp. viii-xiii.
Yes, things that just drift into
your head, Gary, little musings
when one is alone with oneÂ’s
thoughts and I, too, jot them
down. But, unlike you, Gary,
I get lots of ideas from others,
indeed, a veritable cornucopia
of sources. But we both had our
door openers, eh Gary? Mine was
Roger White, the unofficial laureate
poet of the international BahaÂ’i
community in the 1980s and ‘90s.
But I must most deeply thank the
internet, a world-wide-web that
got my work out-there or my words
would have remained gathering dust
in my files forever. And, finally,
like LarsonÂ’s Humour Police, his
readers, and my Poetry Police, my
readers, who hover around and let
me know in no uncertain terms that
I have crossed some invisible line
into total obscurity or obsolescence
and that I am just wasting my time.
Ron Price
14 December2007
PS. I also want to thank: (a) my son for loaning me the biggest, fattest book IÂ’ve ever held in my hands or on my lap, The Far Side, Volume 1, and for continuing to make me laugh as he has done since he was just a little chap; and (b) my wife whose honesty, persistence and her multitude of other qualities have made her my indefatigable collaborator.
