on chesil beach project begins

This week I've begun my first large scale collage project. I purchased a large print copy of Ian McEwan's new novel On Chesil Beach. I thought it would be interesting to try a novel that has just come out.

I am working my way through every page of the book, clipping out what I find interesting. I have a few poems mostly formed and many beginnings. The only "frustrations" I've had are that, since the novel is more 'literary,' there is a severe lack of action verbs. The novel (more a novella, I guess) also is only about two people and they don't talk much--so very little change in diction, very little change in mood, few lively descriptive passages. (Sometimes I wonder if "bad" writing is better for my work...)

I am already beginning to see how the themes of the book begin to rise up--not really themes but motifs and settings. Hotels, rooms, beaches, bodies--and it becomes my own environment, transformed.

Also looking to start my photo-collages again, in which I take photos of colors, shapes, textures, etc. and then collage them together. This is a little different than taking advertisements or other kinds of scraps. There is kind of two-phased selection process, though they are disconnected. I put up some of my older photo-collages today and admired them--I think it's a promising direction still. (Maybe the collage poems and photo-collages can be combined at some point...but everyday I am reminded: you can't force anything with this.)

preparing for the next wave

I have not been collaging lately but hope to once I settle into my new apartment in Chicago. Obviously, collaging takes more location prep than writing in a notebook. Since I've started doing collage poems I've been limited by space--usually having to clean up my mess at the end of a session. So that means I can only go maybe 3 or 4 hours at the most.

In Chicago I plan on having a table dedicated to collaging, with perhaps some kind of cover to protect against breezes. Then I can work on multiple poems at once, stop when exhausted, revise over longer periods of time. My first project will be to do a 'book length' collage--that is, take a novel and continue working on it until I exhaust it, hopefully having at least 10-15 poems of various styles, voices, lengths. (Then we might be able to see how works the same source text across multiple poems.)

I also need to pull together all the work I've done into a portfolio of some kind for graduate school.

I do not know if I will keep FFR up past August--I'll just see where I'm at, how it feels.