My written poetry is an exercise in collage. Being a collage artist, I construct snippets and clippings and bit and pieces of phrases and lines of text garnered from the emails I receive on a daily basis and other sources. This has included spam on how to become rich or establish an erection as well as inspirational, artistic, or intellectual strands of thought and insight, philosophical texts, political texts, spiritual texts, literature, things from comments, articles on almost anything. Anything I can 'cut and paste' online.
I think of my 'voice' as being the collector, arranger, composer of the materials. I don't have the idea of saying something specific to me. It is not 'self expression' as would be typical in poetry but does reflect something about me and the times I live in and what I have been ferreting out.
It is more of an experiment to see what happens trying different methods, different approaches, asking questions, inventing different ways of searching for and gathering things, different ways of looking at things. Like a beach comber. Things that wash up on my shore.
The rules of construction that I use throughout are as follows:
1 - Each line is an independent line of text taken out of its original context, no two lines were originally together except in cases where the line chosen is longer than the poetic form allows in which case they bleed to the next line. These rare cases are usually obvious.
2 - Any time I felt a need to include my own words to add meaning or give a certain spin or to bridge the meanings of two adjoining lines I used [these brackets]. Otherwise any parentheses are naturally occurring found material. I usually have not added commas or periods or other markings in order to maintain the collage feel of the work but I permit myself to 'clean things up' if I feel the need to.
3 - Additionally, I have changed tense or person when I felt it was really critical to do so to maintain the flow of thought.
As far as gathering material aside from whatever comes my way randomly, I will often to searches on a search engine using peculiar arrangements of keyword phrases like for instance: 'repugnant josephson chocolate' Using this search term, which I also used for the title of the poem, I went through the results pages and gathered phrases and then arranged them into a poem or into poetic form. (I just looked up the phrase and now find only references to this poem and one chocolatier.)
Often a narrative starts to emerge and then I might keep that developing narrative in mind as I continue collecting material. The poems are like abstract art in a certain way. To be accepted and enjoy just for what they are, not as a particular, intentional message from the 'poet'. Ambiguous, indeterminant, yet suggestiveness resulting from chance encounters and incongruous abutments to be looked at and considered as a work of art.
You could say my collage poetry is in the surrealist spirit of the most famous line from Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont/Isidore Ducasse: “as beautiful as a chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”.
Thank you so much for sharing this background. Very inspiring work. I often make small collages out of a single magazine including a series of phrases that make a small poem but that’s only a tiny bit like what you’re creating.
Since we usually think of collage as pasting papers together then it would be a natural thought to actually glue words together made of paper. But I decided that any way of connecting things together that were not originally together is a collage 'technology'. At this point we live in a collage world and almost all of our experience is a form of collage. It is the basis of the new world view whether we think about it like that or not. At this point we mix entire cultures together through a form of collage. Put any two words together, it is a collage.
Curious how you approach the art of collage poetry?
My written poetry is an exercise in collage. Being a collage artist, I construct snippets and clippings and bit and pieces of phrases and lines of text garnered from the emails I receive on a daily basis and other sources. This has included spam on how to become rich or establish an erection as well as inspirational, artistic, or intellectual strands of thought and insight, philosophical texts, political texts, spiritual texts, literature, things from comments, articles on almost anything. Anything I can 'cut and paste' online.
I think of my 'voice' as being the collector, arranger, composer of the materials. I don't have the idea of saying something specific to me. It is not 'self expression' as would be typical in poetry but does reflect something about me and the times I live in and what I have been ferreting out.
It is more of an experiment to see what happens trying different methods, different approaches, asking questions, inventing different ways of searching for and gathering things, different ways of looking at things. Like a beach comber. Things that wash up on my shore.
The rules of construction that I use throughout are as follows:
1 - Each line is an independent line of text taken out of its original context, no two lines were originally together except in cases where the line chosen is longer than the poetic form allows in which case they bleed to the next line. These rare cases are usually obvious.
2 - Any time I felt a need to include my own words to add meaning or give a certain spin or to bridge the meanings of two adjoining lines I used [these brackets]. Otherwise any parentheses are naturally occurring found material. I usually have not added commas or periods or other markings in order to maintain the collage feel of the work but I permit myself to 'clean things up' if I feel the need to.
3 - Additionally, I have changed tense or person when I felt it was really critical to do so to maintain the flow of thought.
As far as gathering material aside from whatever comes my way randomly, I will often to searches on a search engine using peculiar arrangements of keyword phrases like for instance: 'repugnant josephson chocolate' Using this search term, which I also used for the title of the poem, I went through the results pages and gathered phrases and then arranged them into a poem or into poetic form. (I just looked up the phrase and now find only references to this poem and one chocolatier.)
Often a narrative starts to emerge and then I might keep that developing narrative in mind as I continue collecting material. The poems are like abstract art in a certain way. To be accepted and enjoy just for what they are, not as a particular, intentional message from the 'poet'. Ambiguous, indeterminant, yet suggestiveness resulting from chance encounters and incongruous abutments to be looked at and considered as a work of art.
You could say my collage poetry is in the surrealist spirit of the most famous line from Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont/Isidore Ducasse: “as beautiful as a chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”.
Thank you so much for sharing this background. Very inspiring work. I often make small collages out of a single magazine including a series of phrases that make a small poem but that’s only a tiny bit like what you’re creating.
Since we usually think of collage as pasting papers together then it would be a natural thought to actually glue words together made of paper. But I decided that any way of connecting things together that were not originally together is a collage 'technology'. At this point we live in a collage world and almost all of our experience is a form of collage. It is the basis of the new world view whether we think about it like that or not. At this point we mix entire cultures together through a form of collage. Put any two words together, it is a collage.
Love that framing. A mash up. A remix. A fusion. There are many different ways of phrasing it but a collage makes a lot of sense.