Forced Fingers Rude

2008-09-16T09:32:00.001-05:00

Frost Cento Intro

2008-09-15T09:15:00.002-05:00

2008-09-15T09:10:00.001-05:00

Stammer Anthem

2008-09-15T08:42:00.000-05:00

2008-09-09T09:10:00.000-05:00

more on the frost cento

2008-02-25T10:01:00.002-06:00

I spent a good number of hours this weekend on my first run through Frost's complete poems. I finished it--at 1 o'clock last night. I now have 128 pages of lines (double spaced).

Needless to say, I need to buy some extra printing paper and another ink cartridge before I proceed to the next step.

As I've been getting into it, I've noticed how unified Frost's poems are from beginning to end. Sometimes it feels like his work was 'made' for my project--all the elements of the story are pervasive throughout all his poems.

In a way, it's going to be a collage poem, a play, an essay, an environment. (I've already started thinking about the performative aspects of this project--but I am getting ahead of myself.) This is definitely the sort of thing I could excerpt for journals or get published as a chapbook by a small press. (Yes, way ahead of myself.)

There's still a little fear (that is, excitement) because I've selected all these lines but I just don't know how they are all going to fit together. And what rules, systems are going to change along the way.

(There's so much more going on in my head--what it's like to use the line, the fact that I can repeat lines in this process, more worrisome questions about authorship than my usual collage poems.)

the 'quick and dirty' collage

2008-02-20T23:09:00.002-06:00

At the end of last semester one of my advisors gave me some texts to read and respond to. I decided to try a kind of 'flash collage'--where I just skimmed the text quickly and wrote down phrases or half-phrases and arranged them quickly together. One I like a lot:

A Skull.

I begin to wonder the way to imagine a man—
          From the ‘how are’ to the ‘I love’
And I dismiss immediately
          But not too much a world of meaning.

The way I’ve managed an observation:
          To curse several times
This perverse private dialogue of awareness
          The expression an equally animal
Can’t think to question.

          But I asked how before they
(The animals, I mean) explode,
          Which is what I can see in its eyes
If it hadn’t meant anything at all
          And was just saying good bye.

new project: cento for frost

2008-02-20T22:47:00.003-06:00

A cento is a poem in which all the lines are taken from other poems. This kind of poem dates back to the times of Virgil, says Wikipedia.

The introduction to my poem is this (true story):

On the afternoon of December 29th, 2007, a hiker discovered Robert Frost’s summer home on Homer Noble Farm vandalized. Furniture had been set on fire; windows, light fixtures, dishes had been destroyed. Urine, vomit and the yellow powder of a discharged fire extinguisher could be found throughout the house.

On hearing this story I immediately thought it would be the perfect occasion for a cento from Frost's poems--a kind of vandalism, yes? It took me awhile to get on it but now I'm on it...going through the complete poems, searching for lines. It's *big* project (much bigger than I realized going into it).

Many of Frost's poems are narrative, have a speaker who speaks in present or past tense. I've been finding lots of great lines surrounding: fire, winter, nighttime, houses being entered, smoking, drinking, young people--mostly I'm just asking as I skim, "How might this fit in?" Yes, it's collage but a very different process for me in this respect: I'm starting with an idea and then letting it inform my selection (rather than my earlier collage poems where I began with language and moved toward voice, meaning, unity). The way things are forming ('how way leads on to way') it will likely be a short play or a series of monologues--from the hiker, someone at the party, and from the ghost of Frost.

I am going to print off the lines I've typed up, cut them apart and then arrangement on a table (like my usual process) but the final poem will be typed up, not pasted down.

2007-10-13T19:20:00.000-05:00

So, I currently have two new projects. One is a book I'm doing collages in in which I'm using Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn. (faster poems, with writing and drawing)

The other book is Ron Hansen's Desperadoes---but I really want to read it. So I'm reading it first. (think collaborative!)

I've been trying to make image transfers with a blender pen and it's not working! Grrrrr.... I'll be so excited if I can get it to work.

I'm thinking we need more and more things collaged now--all kinds of texts. Collaborative collage interests me. Working on integrating writing, drawing and hopefully some images.

the first book is done!

2007-10-10T23:38:00.000-05:00

You can download it here:

http://www.box.net/shared/static/am5hdlf1h5.pdf

I'll post it on the Gourd in a day or so... just wanted all my friends to get it first. :)

2007-10-09T16:15:00.000-05:00

(See also: 22 reasons I make collage poems)

I've always had a need to feel grounded, rooted, connected. I love the idea of imitation--and how imitation was understood before the modern era as a wonderful thing. Now we have to act like it doesn't happen. My work is apart of the longing to imitate.

I also like to think strategically--I enjoy making connections across disparate bodies of knowledge. I like to break things apart and then mend them--break--mend--break--mend.

Much of my poetry prior to this has had a similar need to be ecstatic and scattered--a voice that is attempting to express deep emotion through some invisible constraint.

I want work that is both playful & literary. I love when work is moving on multiple levels at once--the more levels of connection the better. Collage poetry provides more layers of possible self-reference.

I love systems, processes--when the outcome is unpredictable. I want a method I can manipulate but never dictate.

You can plan, plan, plan but at the moment of action you have to give up, adapt, head in a new direction, follow wherever the river takes you. (See Lewis & Clark)

I wanted to do something difficult--a built-in difficulty. For me difficulty is proof of work.

I have had existential worries since I read Sartre and Kierkegaard in high school. This work is about that fear.

The desire to escape the Word Document, the blue-lined notebook page, to work on larger, larger paper (I generally do all my writing now on a very large sketchpad)--all that is an Abstract Expressionist impulse, I believe. I have a need to write BIG (-sized) poems...

...the loss of self-consciousness. Intuition, at play among the materials--I've always wanted that. Also, to be physical, to be active, to make art standing up, to be alert to my surroundings... You see, I never played many sports growing up because I hated competition. It so often ended with someone feeling bad or with people depending on me and me letting them down. For a long time I've been looking for some way to make writing like a sport, to make it fully active, tactile, to require my body and my senses.

As early as I can remember I made things in my bedroom, typically alone--watercolors, board games, short stories, shadow boxes, little environments. I think in my bedroom alone, working with very simple materials, is a very happy place for me.

Someone might say that I collage out of fear of writing my own material. I've written my own material--I'm already tired of myself.

The Trinity, becoming one with the Father, Jesus seen in the face of a stranger... all this is a pseudo-theological justification for something rather mundane that requires no justification (and it sounds kind of overblown anyway).

I've always felt very empathetic towards people. I imagine what it's like to be any stranger I see. Perhaps it started as a game and then became something more. But my whole family is very sensitive to people--all more compassionate than me. I've tried to suppress my own and have also used it very selfishly, especially as I've grown older. Anyway, being inside someone else's words seems very natural to me. I don't really imagine myself as the original author but the idea that we might share something together, that our voices might permeate one another, feels very wholesome to me.

untitled

2007-10-08T20:49:00.000-05:00

Source: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

This one did not make the cut for the collection. I thought it just didn't have as much punch as the others and was perhaps redundant. However, I do think it has some interesting parts.

...almost done!

2007-10-02T20:45:00.000-05:00

Tonight I wrestled over a title for my book (from scraps, of course):

| brave little joke | play | free |

| to see a storm | of | repair |

| a towering pile of | meaning |

And many others I loved less than those. But, as always happened, the best (and final) title happened in a flash of seconds and without warning. Boy, do I want to tell you what it is. But I want everything to come at once like Christmas.

What I have left to do: possibly add illustrations (I want little birds somehow), cut the pages, scan the pages, figure out how to make a PDF file, then figure out how to bind the book. Since there will be only be one book I think the primary distribution will be as a PDF file.

There are several small design problems because I've been making decisions on the fly, which in future books will be eliminated. A few little gluing errors, but much-much cleaner than my early poems (now that I have bookbinder's glue and a fine brush).

Most importantly, I think, is that the humor and playfulness comes through, and the musical qualities of the language, and the love. These poems are the most personal, most honest I've ever composed--unabashedly sentimental.

2007-09-23T20:13:00.000-05:00

Deep into the Chesil Beach project... received some great response at my Process/Project workshop class...more poems coming but I'm likely not to show anything more until the booklet is done. Very good things happening.

two magic moments

2007-09-06T18:10:00.000-05:00

In the poems of this series I’ve made more references to myself. The opening poem “A Note About The Author” is all self-referential and a bit self-deprecating. As my work has developed, I’ve begun to center around two ‘magic moments’ that I want to create. The first kind of moment happens when someone is reading a collage and thinking ‘oh, this is somebody else’s words he’s using’ and then suddenly, in the middle of the poem, it comes over him or her—‘this is him talking, this is autobiography.’ A person rises up out of the wreckage.

The second moment I want to create is the one that happens every time we read. Collage wakes us up to the reading process, the line is uneven, there are distracting breaks in the middle of phrases. In a collage poem the reader has to put together the words in his head to find the sense. But then this gets faster, and once the reader has read perhaps 10 poems, the collage is working in the background and he or she is feeling the emotion of the poem—caught up in the characters, or the mood, the ideas, the claims being made.

In that way, I want the poems to be poems. The collage process is not ‘instant poetry’—it’s just a method that creates particular effects. But I want them to be good poems in a traditional sense, considering sound, meter, musicality, etc..Ultimately, I want to have poems that have trouble talking, have trouble referring to things, but sometimes do, are sometimes very personal and heartfelt, if fleetingly.

(draft)

2007-09-03T09:43:00.001-05:00

A Note About The Author
Source: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

(draft)

2007-09-03T09:38:00.000-05:00

not made or a word not spoken
Source: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

(draft)

2007-09-01T11:34:00.001-05:00

love. At the age of twenty-two

Source: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

on chesil beach project begins

2007-08-25T21:52:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-04T12:06:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-06-28T10:26:00.001-05:00

Sources: "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor; Scientific American; Outside magazine

2007-06-28T10:24:00.000-05:00

Source: "The Decay of Lying" by Oscar Wilde; back issues of Outside magazine

2007-06-28T10:23:00.001-05:00

Sources: "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor; Aesop's Fables; back issues of Outside magazine

2007-06-28T10:21:00.001-05:00

Sources: "The Decay of Lying" by Oscar Wilde; back issues of Outside magazine

2007-06-26T10:13:00.000-05:00

Untitled (Eve)
Source: "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" by Flannery O'Connor

2007-06-26T09:55:00.000-05:00

... the more you cut the more your voice intrudes ... Bukowski: small poems that slowly build an entire Self ... maybe texts you don't know are better ... poems where the first line is a full uncut line from the text: it sets the voice, tone, line, sounds ... audio recordings to accompany ... the lesser and greater reséarches ... the short choppy poem vs the long smoothed-out poem ... you can only work for a few hours a day, then take a walk--see friends ... the first poems remain the best--why? ... "I have no Inner Resources" ... I need to be able to save work-in-progress over time and to work on serveral poems simultaneously ... have you thought about mixing texts? (Origin of Species and My Utmost For His Highest, The Elegant Universe and a Zane Grey western) ... read more Wittgenstein ...

2007-06-20T12:00:00.000-05:00

Source: "the man from gadarenes" by Myself

20 Jun 07: some theory (the big humble work)

2007-06-20T10:41:00.000-05:00

Collage wakes you up to the size and length of words--how long they take.
Collage wakes you up to the act of reading, of constructing while you read (the lines uneven).
Word play in collage wakes you up to the sounds of words.
Collage wakes you up to syntax--grammar becomes artistic.

We take these public words, these words that are not our own and we draw them into ourselves and we reshape them to say something truly meaningful to us... I am taking about everyday speech.

You lose yourself in someone else and find your voice still coming through. Your eye is unique and it picks out words and cuts them in your natural cadence. Yet you find yourself saying things you never would've said in ways you never thought to say them.

Words come first, then the meaning grows. Though not always. Meaning helps selection, too.

I am interested in--almost solely--emotional expression. A longing, a loss, a worry. (air in a house we all feel) We beat out our souls on these crude drums, believing we say something deep. Maybe it isn't deep at all (nature's entire lack of a plum)--maybe it is shuffling someone else's words and dealing them out again. We still speak when we know nothing. (everything is a kind of cowardly) Yet even if it isn't ontologically deep, it matters to us.

With collage you do not need to wait for inspiration to act—you dig right in and wrestle it out from the material. It halfway finds you. Revision is easy and often a surprise.

This is the big humble work. You have to understand I’m trying to say something really thoughtful here—not just thrown together but something that I really believe and mean to say. I’m thinking about people I know when I write these. I’m making philosophical and theological claims. I’m judging you. But it’s collage—scissors and glue—and what does that matter? Is this just a game, a toy?

While I work I feel very serious but when I am done I think it’s a joke.
I’m talking about human discourse. I’m talking about being human.

early work

2007-06-20T10:11:00.000-05:00

I've decided to add my first collages to the beginning of the blog (scroll down):

"Goodbye California..."
"We hope this..."
Untitled (prodigal son)
"Strangely, the big humble work..."

20 Jun 07: process

2007-06-20T09:55:00.001-05:00

Texts: I'm done with Wilde's essay for now. Because of its conversational tone it lacks vivid language, which makes for poems that sound the same. I have been finding all my texts on Project Gutenberg. I format them in Word to a large enough size to be handled and then I print them off. This, of course, limits the texts I can use to early 20th Century and prior. Also, unlike other collage work, I have control over font and font size. I don't know how I feel about that. Still looking for a good text...

Cutting: I set the fonts to 1 1/2 spacing so that I can cut them clean but this often gives me a lot of space above or below the words. Also, I rarely cut straight lines. Both of these things affect the expression of the word or phrase--though I'm still trying to feel what that is.

Pasting: I have not yet found a way to paste that makes me happy. I use rubber cement or a glue stick. The cement is often globby in a way that I can't control well. I would like to find a process where I can keep a composition without permanently mounting it so that I can make future revisions and combine poems together.

Board: This summer I've been pasting the poems onto small cardstock squares used for scrapbooking. I thought the small size would give some kind of structure to the poems but I find it too restrictive. I am interested in seeing how long I can sustain a poem.

Photos: I've found the only way to get the color right and get the image bright is to take pictures of them outside on a sunny day. Even then I have to take several to make sure one is clear enough. I do some tweaking in a photo editor before I post them. I see so much more detail when they are photos.

2007-06-20T09:47:00.001-05:00

Source: "The Cock and the Pearl" from Aesop's Fables

2007-06-20T09:45:00.000-05:00

Source: "The Decay of Lying" by Oscar Wilde

2007-06-07T18:03:00.001-05:00

"What we feel as creation is only selection and grouping."
- Robert Frost

2007-06-06T23:22:00.001-05:00

Sources: Scientific American; "The Decay of Lying" by Oscar Wilde

2007-06-06T23:12:00.000-05:00

Sources: Scientific American; "The Decay of Lying" by Oscar Wilde

6 Jun 07: notes

2007-06-06T22:00:00.000-05:00

- First time using images. I took a stack of old issues of Scientific Americans from the library (set out for free, not stolen) but they were unfruitful for the most part. Need to find other magazines, though I'd like to avoid, say, Time or mainstream mags.

- Image was useful for drawing the poem away from the text. There is a challenge in trying to talk about something completely different than the original author. Image makes composition more important.

- "a kind of cowardly" ... like how this was pulled from context.

- "don't coop a bloom" like 'Don't cop a tude' but means 'don't hide a budding flower'

- "we study What Art" as in 'How Great Thou Art'

- "entire lack of a plum" is to mean 'plumb'... hmmm...does this come across?

2007-05-28T14:25:00.001-05:00

Source: "The Decay of Lying" by Oscar Wilde

2007-05-28T14:23:00.001-05:00

Source: "The Decay of Lying" by Oscar Wilde

why this blog

2007-05-28T13:59:00.000-05:00

Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more
Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sear,
I come to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,
And with forc'd fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

This blog is for my budding interest in collage poetry. The name of the blog comes from the opening of Milton's Lycidas.

Forced. Collage poetry forces the composer into a tighter form.

Fingers. I suppose all writing requires the use of fingers but collage has a particularly tactile component.

Rude. Destroying and reading against the author's text that he or she so carefully wrote.

Shatter. Cutting the text.

Leaves. Of books.

Before the mellowing year. This fall I am going to be attending graduate school and hope to continue with my collage poems in more depth. Before then I hope to accumulate a good number of poems so I have a good sense of direction by then.

I consider this a workshop blog--a place to show all my mistakes and reflect critically on my work. Advice, comments, questions are always very welcome.

2007-05-24T10:25:00.000-05:00

Source: Kundu by Morris West (Large Print Edition)

2007-05-23T10:23:00.000-05:00

Untitled (Prodigal Son)
Source: Kundu by Morris West (Large Print Edition)

2007-05-21T10:20:00.000-05:00

Source: Kundu by Morris West (Large Print Edition)

2007-05-20T10:19:00.000-05:00

Source: Kundu by Morris West (Large Print Edition)
First seen at Notes from Wazoo Farm