Collages have become kind of popular these days. Or maybe actually they’ve always been popular. Or maybe just recently become popular with me? But take Edward Scissorhands for example. When he sees Kim Bogg’s room for the first time and is falling in love with her pictures, the camera pauses for a while as Edward considers the different pictures and images cut up and decorated around her mirror.
How clever and perfect and beautiful that the man with scissors for hands is enamored with a girl who dabbles in collage: the cutting up and juxtaposing of text and image. Can you imagine the two of them scrapbooking? Or creating an entire mural? He would be the master of the snip-snip and she would rule with the glue sticks.
And now we have artists like Tess Johnson and apps like the one the Shins just created on which the users can create collages with band flyers.
Collage is very in.
And now we also have hybrid texts, like Citizen by Claudia Rankine, books that combine photography with poetry with essay and on and on.
Collage can be something writers do too.
To quote David Shields from a book he co-edited with Elizabeth Cooperman entitled Life is Short—Art is Shorter: “A traditional story depends upon the elaboration of plot; collage depends upon the orchestration of variegated materials—separated by white space and unconnected by plot—into theme.”
Below is something that I made from all the lines written in my notebook that I marked with a triangle. Some might just call it a list. David Shields might call it a “thematic silo.” I kind of just want to call it a collage…
Collage of
“I want to make the thing that makes the thing.”
What does writing letters everyday do to your inner conversation with yourself?
the land of flowers
“public display of the self”?
What if I was the one that found him?
A girl in a well
Mom/vacuum cleaner
“no daylight between them”
“With holes in it”
Add the personal, the exact.
Dad jokes – (the Quiet Desperation of)
like I need to make a chart (of simple things)
Do the absences on either end say anything to each other?
something dear
dismantling memories –/construct them
Forgiving him
Solitary/locked in a room
all our secrets are the same
about being honest with yourself
fraudulent artifacts
transcripts/monologue
silences/soundtrack
author free falling in crisis/cultural crisis/human nature
empty car
silos
poems with “old” s – lowercase is “f”
repression physically changes us
all female trinity
A field of cemeteries
Sara Sheiner is about to be an unemployed poet & maybe-collagist.
The Minnesota Review 