But first, a memory that's stuck with me that I think finally has a place to go. When I was under ten or so there was a show on Nickelodeon called "Oh Yeah Cartoons!*" In an ad disguised as a behind the scenes interview, the off screen speaker asks a creator (not really sure who it was or what their exact role was) "so what makes an Oh yeah Cartoon?" and the guy found it a bit weird to answer, especially in a way comprehensible to the target audience. He listed something along the lines of "long thin arms, but also big heads, but also circle heads, but also yada, yada, yada... I dunno. Watch the show and you tell me."
When I tell people I write, one of the common questions is what is my style like. Well, I'll give a response along much the same lines. Things I think characterize what make up "Jason poems" and are pushing me to finding out what the idea of a "Jason poem" could really mean often include, but are not limited to:
- A willingness to find humor or happiness in everything while working to avoid easy answers/romanticizing/short changing.
- Some real darkness. For someone almost always smiling and joking, that does not happen nearly as much in my art, for better or for worse. Though since becoming aware of this fact I have been noticing a shift. Not to a simple "happy" but to find more awe in everything.
- An obsession with myth
- superheroes as being just a worthy myth as rural folklore or Greek mythology
- mythic topics/characters/concepts treated as everyday
- everyday treated as mythic topics/characters/concepts
- Work in different voices
- mine at different ages/awareness/emotions/forms of self
- persona as other humans, but more likely monsters or gods
- A sense that there is magic and awe everywhere. I try to write (sometimes simultaneously) from both the child in me that is curious and finds amazingness in everything as well as the older than my age side in me that is able to examine things calmly, coolly, objectively, and as part of something bigger.
Stylishly,
Jason
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