He died in 1918 at the age of 38 within days of the Armistice of WWI, and some of the poetry Craghead uses here from Apollinaire is about the war, a kind of artistic stand against it.Ĭraghead says of him, "He was in the war and knew how to be everywhere."Īpollinaire's epitaph: "He knew how to love."Īpollinaire: "And sing right through the gunfire/and branches wave their leaves resembling poor sailors/winged and whirling like fake leaves/ You must be tired of startling the sky"Īpollinaire: "And may all things bear a new name." (And this is Craghead's challenge, too, to make things new, rename them and not just "reflect" Apollinaire's poetry). Craghead writes an introduction in which he says he is influenced by Apollinaire's "collage" approach to art and poetry in his comics-making, an approach "that does not just represent the world but competes with it." Apollinaire, Craghead claims, invented the modern "calligramme" or visual poem (or concrete poem: poems in the form of the content they address: A poem about a boot in the shape of a boot, for instance), and coined the word "surrealism" as an approach to art. A great collection of comics as poetry and comics as more than merely illustrating excerpts from the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.
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