How to Make Collage Poetry
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Collage poetry is poetry that has been constructed rather than invented. This is a distinction similar to the difference between a drawing and a collage. A drawing is completely fabricated by the artist while a collage is constructed from preexisting parts which have been carefully arranged or even haphazardly arranged! These arrangements are often disjointed, surprising and serendipitous.
Just so, collage poetry is an exercise in collage. The author, being a collage artist, constructs snippets and clippings of gathered phrases and lines of text garnered from the emails he receives on a daily basis, key word and phrase searches on line and other sources. This might include the latest spam on how to become rich or establish an erection using Viagra as well as inspirational, artistic, or intellectual strands of thought and insight. The resultant combinations often yield surprising, humorous, insightful, ambiguous and intriguing composites.
The rules of construction that I have used throughout my body of work 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 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.
My poems have been constructed beginning in 2000 while living in Cuernavaca, Mexico and are ongoing to the present. Many of them have been posted to various email groups including fluxlist, Collage Poetry, Massurrealist and Post-Dogmatist email groups and or published in books.
Sample collage poem:
Against All Expectations
Against all expectations
There was a mass public outcry.
[Against the] sea of received virtual information.
Conceptions of data absorption,
The hunt for the ghost in the machine of language.
The more time you work processing
will become an issue of liability.
What the hell IS required reading these days?
It’s plain, I am out of my depth.
