Every creative act is influenced directly and subconsciously by the creative acts of thousands of other artists. As Pablo Picasso put it:
Author, blackout poet, and cartoonist Austin Kleon’s best-selling book, Steal Like an Artist, explores this part of the artistic process in fascinating detail.
Similarly, the writer Cormac McCarthy said, “Books are made out of books.”
The key to being original is to soak up a lot of influences and let your subconscious blend them with your experiences, skills, and artistic voice. Whether you are a writer or a visual artist, all art is, in some way, a collage of what has come before.
It’s your human experience that makes a piece of art interesting. This is why no matter how good AI gets at creating images and writing, it will never make art. AI might be a tool for creatives, but just like a paintbrush on a palette is not an artist, neither is a large language model.
My primary mode of artistic expression is making haiku comics. Last October, I created this haiku comic:
My process of creating this piece of art is a case study of the conscious and unconscious ways influences make their way into our art. And — to get even more meta — my idea for this story is itself “stolen” from others like Kleon.
This poem and post are also my way of stealing from two incredible poets, Jonathan Potter and Brian Funke.
Potter shares his sunrise poems and photos every morning. Not only is each poem masterfully crafted and a moving tribute to the beauty of each day, but his work has also motivated me to pay much closer attention to each dawn I’m blessed to experience. Potter was very much on my mind the morning I was first inspired to write this haiku.
Funke shares his poetry and then artfully explicates his process for a given poem a week or so later. Today, I’m laying my process bare for the writing of this haiku.
When I Saw the Ethereal Glow
On Tuesday, October 31, 2023, I was driving back from dropping off the kids at school when I was stunned by the beauty of the dawn. On the driver’s side of the car was a set of train tracks and the eastern sky.
It was one of the most spectacular sights I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of sunrises from mountaintops, beaches, forests, and other scenic locales.
One of my first thoughts was, “I wish I could read what Jonathan Potter would make of this sunrise.”
Then I remembered I’m also a poet and thought I’d hazard a sunrise poem.
I did my best to take in as much of the scene as possible while also driving as safely as possible. Once I arrived home, the first thing I did was write down some notes. Here’s the page:
In case you cannot make sense of my chicken scratch, here is what the notes say:
Tuesday, October 31, 2023 7:50 am Studio
Observations for later haiku about the sunrise today.
Eastern sky orange, purple, radioactive glow. Mt. Jefferson purple mountain majesty Cascade range in purple silhouette. Clouds like rough seas, barrows in the sky deep orange glow behind mountains Sunrise in Willamette Valley red sky in morning, sailors take warning. Record sunrise quality b/c its memory fades like a vivid dream upon awakening.
11:42 Library
Yesterday’s vibrant fall foliage feels pale & drab after seeing the magnificent dawn.
Later that afternoon, I went for a walk and began turning the experience over in my mind, looking for a way in.
I loved the image that “radioactive” conveyed, but at five syllables, it was too long for this haiku. I also tried to use “Mount Jefferson” because I’ve been working on being more place-specific with some of my haiku.
I use Google Keep to take notes on my phone. There, I have a file called Poetry Boneyard, where I put poem starts and ideas when I’m rambling in the world.
There, I jotted down this:
Mount Jefferson lurks at the edge of the horizon, like a mysterious figure in a trenchcoat just outside the halo of a streetlight.
When I returned to my car, I had the start of something. In the Poetry Boneyard, I wrote:
Nuclear glow, Jefferson in silhouette, an autumn sunrise
I added this haiku to my spreadsheet and intended to let it sit for a few days. Instead, I immediately started to tweak it.
Nuclear didn’t feel right. It gave off the wrong vibe for what I was trying to communicate. I also disliked Jefferson. Without being paired with Mount, it made no sense, and Mount Jefferson did not combine well with silhouette, the only word I was confident was staying.
I began going through words that would work with glow and ethereal popped into my mind. “Ethereal glow” felt true to the moment I had experienced and was more appropriately poetic than “nuclear glow.”
Even though I had first noticed Mount Jefferson from the car, I could also see other peaks, such as Mount Baker and Mount Hood. I circled back to the use of the Cascade range that I had in my notes. “Cascades in silhouette” is six syllables. After trying different word orders, conjunctions, and articles, I felt “put” was best because, as a verb, it allowed the glow to have some agency. That made the poem more interesting.
I left the last line, “an autumn sunrise,” because I couldn’t think of anything better, and I liked the matter-of-fact turn to end the poem after the more spectacular imagery of the first two lines.
The poem then read:
ethereal glow
put Cascasades in silhouette
an autumnal sunrise
This is how the haiku read when I started on the artwork.
After I finished the comic, I realized the last line was wrong. It had one too many syllables. I changed it to “autumnal sunrise.” This feels more elegant and looks more streamlined on the page. Plus, what’s the point of being a poet if you can’t use autumnal occasionally? When else are you going to get to use that word?
Sometimes, a haiku will just come to me fully formed. But often, I have to work the poem over to get it into fighting shape.
The poem is only part of a poetry comic. I usually, but not always, make poetry comics by writing a poem first and then illustrating that poem.
Visual Art
One additional influence that I frequently steal from is illustrator Eric Carle. I have loved his picture books since I was a child, and there is a little bit of The Hungry Caterpillar in all my illustrations. When I first started creating illustrations, I unconsciously used a collage process similar to Carle’s, where I digitally cut out shapes from color swaths I had physically created with watercolor paints and watercolor pens.
I used that process with the art for this haiku comic.
I have an extensive library of what I call color swaths that I use and reuse to create shapes of things like the mountains, sun, and sky in these four panels.
Capturing the ethereal glow visually was simple, as I already had the perfect colors in my palette. But getting the colors of the mountains right was a challenge. It took a lot of experimenting before I found something between blue and purple that contrasted well with the sky to give truth to the use of silhouette in the poem, while also giving the reader a visual delight that black and brown didn’t deliver.
Comic Making
The last phase of the project is the lettering. This is where I combine the words and pictures, turning the project into a haiku comic.
I placed the first line of the haiku, “ethereal glow,” against an almost entirely dark panel because that would help the phrase pop.
I used each line in a single panel, as is my general practice. This helps the reader see the poem’s structure and allows me to introduce a moment of silence by leaving the last panel free from words.
I also worked to ensure that the panels were arranged to show the passing of time. Haiku is the poetry of the moment, and I like to play with the passage of time in my haiku comics. In his essential book, Understanding Comics, author Scott McCloud says that true comics are sequential art. Time has to pass for something to be a comic instead of just an illustration. While I often love to bend (and break) this rule in my work, McCloud’s echoing in my mind as I organized the panels and words for this haiku comic.
I purposefully follow the comics convention of using all capital letters in my haiku comics because it makes them easier to read, and because I generally use all lowercase in my haiku writing, and when the poems in the comics are in all capital letters, it is the same as not having anything capitalized.
Here again, is the finished product of all of those influences:
Every part of this haiku comic, and this post discussing this haiku comic, was influenced by the work of other creatives. I’ve only listed my conscious influences here. If I were to press myself, I would find many more artists who played a part in this creative act. You probably can see many influences that I’m not aware of.
Does that mean this haiku comic is somehow plagiarized? No. This is an original work because all I have “stolen” has been combined with my experiences and voice to create something new.
Am I doing the same thing as AI?
Again, no. The large language models (LLMs) that power most of our AI tools have no point of view or experience. They use art as points of data and then arrange words or pixels in a way that is statistically likely to match the requirements of a prompt.
An AI image isn’t speaking to the unique yearnings of a soul. Human-made art is in conversation with everything that has come before and tells us something about our present and future. AI images and words are shackled to preexisting data and have no point of view.
Almost any AI image machine can produce more visually attractive illustrations than my work. AI chatbots can write haiku much faster than I can, and perhaps even make more exciting arrangements of words in lines of five and seven syllables.
But no AI model can tell you how the sunrise on a beautiful October morning made them feel, and that’s why you and I will continue to create and share art.
Good artists borrow, great artists steal, and all artists feel.
Jason McBride is the Creative Director and Senior B2B copywriter of Weirdo Poetry, A B2B Creative Agency.
This post was originally published behind the paywall on Medium and was adapted from an earlier version on the Weirdo Poetry newsletter.