“One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop

My comics adaptation of one of Elizabeth Bishop’s (1911-1979) last and most beautiful poems, “One Art,” first published in 1976. The poem is a villanelle, and there is something about the highly structured rhyme scheme of this verse form that to me always seems to give these works a bit of a game-like quality (which is not to say the emotions expressed therein can’t be very serious and powerful, as this particular poem demonstrates). This element of ordered playfulness suggested my imagining of the poem as a kind of Monopoly/Chutes and Ladders board game board.

There are very few digital elements in this comic. The drawings were inked on arrangements of pieces of differently-coloured Bristol board and the slides, ladders, and Monopoly houses are painted Bristol board cut-outs which I glued onto the page.