“3. COLLAGE, or, THE SPLICE OF LIFE:

I turned to collage early, to get away from writing poems about my overwhelming mother. I felt I needed to do something “objective” that would get me out of myself. I took books off the shelf, selected maybe one word from every page or a phrase every tenth page, and tried to work these into structures. Some worked, some didn’t. But when I looked at them a while later: they were still about my mother. (As Tristan Tzara would have predicted. His recipe for making a Dadaist poem by cutting up a newspaper article ends with: “The poem will resemble you.”)

This was a revelation–and a liberation. I realized that subject matter is not something to worry about. Your concerns and obsessions will surface no matter what you do. This frees you to work on form, which is all one can work on consciously. For the rest, all you can do is try to keep your mind alive, your curiosity and ability to see.

Even more important was the second revelation: that any constraint stretches the imagination, pull you into semantic fields different from the one you started with. For though the poems were still about my mother, something else was also beginning to happen.

Georges Braque: “You must always have 2 ideas, one to destroy the other. The painting is finished when the concept is obliterated.”

(Barbara Guest would qualify that the constraints must be such that they stretch the imagination without disabling it.)

Collage, like fragmentation, allows you to frustrate the expectation of continuity, of step-by-step-linearity. And if the fields you juxtapose are different enough there are sparks from the edges. Here is a paragraph from A Key Into the Language of America that tries to get at the clash of Indian and European cultures by juxtaposing phrases from Roger William’s 1743 treatise with contemporary elements from anywhere in my Western heritage.

OF MARRIAGE

Flesh, considered as cognitive region, as opposed to undifferentiated warmth, is called woman or wife. The number not stinted, yet the Narragansett (generally) have but one. While diminutives are coined with reckless freedom, the deep structure of the marriage bed is universally esteemed even in translation. If the woman be false to bedlock, the offended husband will be solemnly avenged, arid and eroded. He may remove her clothes at any angle between horizontal planes.”

(Rosmarie Waldrop, from “Thinking of Follows”.)

“Paris is becoming fantastic. Those buses without horses . . . You seem to be living in the land of shades. And this thought comes back to me: ‘Aren’t we all dead without knowing it?’ In these sounds, reflections, in this mist, you walk in anxiety, less with the fear of being run over than with the fear of no longer being alive. The impression of being in an immense cave, and your head in a pulp from the noise.”

(Jules Renard, December 1905, p. 190 in The Journals of Jules Renard, ed. & trans. Louise Bogan & Elizabeth Roget.)

“Harnett had to earn his living, in nineteenth-century New York, by painting such trompe-l’œil compositions to decorate public bars, and it appears that he never sold a single picture, in his lifetime, to any of the important American art collectors of his day. He did manage, however, to become a celebrity, for a while, among the Broadway journalists who frequented the bars where his paintings were exhibited. One of these happened to represent a still-life arrangement of various objects that included a dollar-bill which looked as if it could be literally lifted out of the picture and taken away in one’s pocket, so that a legend, probably apocryphal, soon began to circulate about this picture. One newspaper of the period even states that the United States Government sued Harnett for counterfeiting the national currency, but that the artist then won his case in court by pointing out that his dollar-bill was painted on a board too big to fit in a man’s pocket and too thick to be mistakenly accepted in lieu of paper money. I have tried to find records of this strange case in American legal literature, but without any successs.”

(Edouard Roditi, in an interview with Giorgio Morandi, p. 148 in Karen Wilkins’s Giorgio Morandi: works, writings and interviews.)

“Schwob told us further:

‘Baudelaire, in a beer tavern, declared: “There’s a smell of destruction here.” “Why, no,” he was told, “There’s a smell of sauerkraut, and of slightly warm woman.” But Baudelaire repeated with violence: “I tell you it smells of destruction!” ‘ “

(Jules Renard, January 1892, p. 45 in The Journals of Jules Renard, ed. & trans. Louise Bogan & Elizabeth Roget.)

“A thought written down is dead. It was alive. It lives no longer. It was a flower. Writing it down has made it artificial, that is to say, immutable.”

(Jules Renard, November 1888, p. 21 in The Journals of Jules Renard, ed. & trans. Louise Bogan & Elizabeth Roget.)