How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #36: Collage Poetry

An update from the thirty-sixth Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett

A summary of the workshop held on Saturday May 7, plus some of the output published below

This week, we continued with Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the new Millennium. After focusing on "lightness" last week, we turned our focus to "multiplicity," defined as the quality or state of being multiple or various. Naturally then, we discussed the epitome of multiplicity: collage poetry. To begin, we discussed the history of collage as an art form, noting its rise in popularity in the early 1920's, especially among experimental painters of the cubist and dadaist movements. Some collage paintings we discussed were Picasso's Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass, Hannah Höch's paintings Fur Ein Fest Gemacht and Flight, John Stezaker's Muse, and Jesse Treece's Mountains Between (pictured above). We then broke into some definitions of collage, defining it as the art of choosing, affixing, juxtaposing, and arranging. This led us to discuss collage amongst writers, noting in particular the "cut-up" method of composition, wherein writers cut out words from newspapers, scriptures, magazines, etc. and put them in a hat before randomly selecting them to create a poem. Some examples of collage poetry we read were Ted Berrigan's "The Sonnets," an excerpt from T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," and an excerpt from Ezra Pound's 'The Cantos."

The Challenge: Make a poem with entirely found language: combine language (phrases, words, sentences) from multiple outside sources. Participants can use sentences around them from books, magazines, newspapers, street signs, conversations, other poems, etc.

The Participants: Emma, Zar, Alice, Ellie, Samantha, Anna, Shiva, Nova, Lina, Fatehbir

To watch the readings from this workshop, click here. 

Anonymous Child

Anna Cronin, 9

Here is the revelation bright as the morning star

The truth is:

 I know how intimidating it can be

Creating your own, a vine and its branches

The meal that’s special, the mothers example

It’s all the same, sending them into his vineyard

To some people, the reactions are new creations

The goal in my first few years is pure: are we high functioning?

Who is like them?

They designed the central aim and the great theologians. What stereotypes drift in the wind, and what organizations of their character practice.

While not all months are education, degrees in headquarters are anonymous like a good person.

Multicolors, like a scene, are wild and beautiful.

Self-concept is extreme humility, but why did the responsibility of the child matter?

Additional scattering in our citizenship is healing, A vision for growth of the stones with power

Some define brilliance in friendship and models, and for decades to come aromas pass.

Finally, despite our emphasis, transitions will happen.

And coaching includes our thoughts, not yours.

Core Collapse Supernova

Emma Hoff, 10