Erin Singleton © 2021
collage as fraught play
by Erika Howsare
I love quilts. And I love mix tapes (still), Joseph Cornell, road trips that bring you to Memphis one day and the Rockies the next day, a bookshelf that holds field guides next to the litmags and monographs and gardening manuals. In short, I love collage, in art and life.
Life is a collage. I have always seen the mixing of elements—through sampling, cut-ups, juxtaposition—as the truest form of realism. (In the other room, this very moment, a member of my family just recited a little Shakespeare and then segued smoothly into an off-key rendition of “We Will Rock You.” Our day so far has revolved around a sewing machine, a world map, and a book of Greek mythology.)
No surprise, then, that collage has been one of my primary writing techniques, ever since I first learned the trick of opening an unrelated book and stealing phrases to layer into my poems. I’d suspected this was possible after reading Such Rich Hour by Cole Swensen, who found ways to incorporate into her poems, for example, the fact that there were 1.7 million bells in medieval France, and to hint through well-placed quotation marks and italics at a vast world of sources informing her contemplations. As for me, the volume I first plundered was a coffee-table book called Our National Parks, and it yielded little gems like “Bones were broken and fashioned into awls, punches, needles and fleshers.”
They were lines I would never have written as originals, at least not while acting the poet. I liked the results of combining them with my own words so much that I went on to write entire manuscripts that way, based on the journals of Lewis and Clark (ah, the fabulous texture and grit of the spelling: “a whiper will perched on the Boat for a short time”) and on the travel accounts of Isabella Bird.
Years later, I still find a certain generative friction in the meeting of my own mind with something that already existed, an object that was sitting around in the world, being itself. As Rosmarie Waldrop says, “I tend to think [the fragment] is our way of apprehending anything. Our inclusive views are mosaics. And the shards catch light on the cut, the edges give off sparks.”
*
A few months ago I received the wonderful gift of Normandi Ellis’ Awakening Osiris: The Egyptian Book of the Dead. At the time I was feeling somewhat stymied in my poetry life. I also suspected that the best way to approach reading Osiris would be devotionally, one chapter at a time, in some sort of concentrated mental state. Thus evolved my plan: to write a poem for each of the book’s sections, incorporating some of Ellis’ numinous phrases wherever I could divine connections. To put it more plainly, I would sit down, open the book and a notebook side-by-side, and write whatever came to mind, copying down a line from Ellis when the flow of my own words slowed.
I knew this would produce very rough drafts, at best. There is an initial period of messiness, chaos, dimness through which “the sun appears golden as an opening eye,” as Ellis has it—a freewheeling, maybe even Dionysian dance with mysterious forces that are operating within the poem and which only the process of discovering the poem can reveal. During that initial phase, nothing resembling a finished piece appeared. But I just wanted to get some material down, and it was working: Osiris is incredibly juicy (check this line, on the very first page: “It is joy to lick the wind”) and it helped me frame my own experience in a way that I couldn’t have done without its participation.
A couple of weeks into this project, I arrived at Ellis’ sixth chapter, “The History of Creation.” Not only is this chapter fairly grand in its scope, as the title suggests, but my own material at the time was growing from a deep place, a horror specific to some news photos I’d been viewing, and my discomfort with the impossibility/necessity of resuming my own life after seeing them. It felt like a lot to contain in a poem and I was unsure, as I often am, of the fitness of poetry itself as a bulwark against, or an answer to, such realities. Partly for that reason I included a lot of very mundane details in my notes—the shadow of the candle I was burning, the sound of a passing car. Such imagery has a quality of undeniability, an anchor to the world.
All this filled about three pages in my notebook, sprinkled here and there with lines from Ellis’ chapter: It is the slaughterhouse where matter is sliced from spirit. And: This skin I wear is imagination.
It was too much material, and though at this point I had a semblance of “topic,” I had no idea what form the piece would take, even whether it would be lineated. Now the task was to size up the elements I had at hand, and to winnow and arrange them so they’d stand forth to best advantage.
What I love about this work is that, unlike much of what I do all day, it so openly demands that I bring intuition to the table. There are plenty of technical decisions needing to be made, about stanza breaks, indentations, punctuation, and rhythm, but they are all like boats riding a deeper current: a mysterious hunt for what just feels right.
These are moves akin to things a painter would do: moment-by-moment craft, paired with the sixth sense of what goes where, what makes a composition, what shifts in hue or intensity should occur in which just-now-coming-into-being locations. Ellis’ language presented its own challenges. I wasn’t going to alter her lines—I would either take them as they were, or leave them out—so they represented a kind of guardrail, or borderland, beyond which I could not stray.
*
As that limitation implies, apart from questions of craft, there are ethical considerations that arise during this process. I used the word “plunder” earlier, not without regard for its negative connotations. Stripping ore out of Lewis and Clark’s journals is a bit like quoting the Declaration of Independence—it’s something everyone has a right to—but helping myself to passages of text from an ancient civilization, as translated by a specific American writer of the twentieth century, is somewhat more fraught (not only with ethical issues, but with potential legal troubles regarding copyright, too).
At worst, it might amount to tomb-robbing; the urge to collect is always a little suspect, connected as it is to acts of colonization. While I was working on this series, I picked up Paul Metcalf’s Collected Works, Vol. 1, and turned to Apalache—his 1976 book-length collage of language from historical sources regarding the European encounter with eastern North America. It has a bibliography 10 pages long: explorers’ accounts, natural histories, glossaries of Native American place names.
Here’s a little taste, the very first passage:
It happens that the land is smelt before it is seen
The fragrance drifts seaward / we smelled the land a hundred
leagues, and farther when they burned the cedars / before we come in
sight of it thirty leagues, we smell a sweet savour / we had now fair
sunshine weather, and so pleasant a sweet air as did much refresh us . . .
. . . the odorous fmell and beawtie / small wooddes very well smellinge / the sweet
fragrance of spruce / adorned and clothed with palms, laurels, cypresses…
When I read this, I swooned: for the propulsive technique, the textural touches, the sensitivity to rhythm. I could feel what Metcalf had done to create this—I could almost see the fragments hovering in the air inches over his desk, and his hands coaxing them into the right positions on his page, as though he were a magician. And I wanted to do it too.
But at the same time, I can’t ignore that this passage, and its seductive flavor, are an illustration and maybe even a reprise of the urge to colonize. Just as Metcalf’s sources were aroused by the possibility of what they believed was a virgin continent—literally “had smelling of” its fragrance—a writer may be allured by others’ phrases.
Borrowing happens in context. I won’t speak here to the specific manner in which Metcalf cast these lines in 1976—I love his writing enough to hope that he intended it as a critique—but I want my own work, in 2021, to be as responsible for itself as possible.
In this case, I wanted to make sure that whatever poem I ended up with honored both the depth of the original Egyptian texts and the vitality of Ellis’ translation. It was a matter of balancing three different inner selves. One is the writer—the id-me who ranged all over the page, the topic, the language, filling those three pages. The second is the editor, who was politely banished from the first stage, but who now is permitted to step into the room and say things out loud about what she sees.
The third, and the hardest to identify, is a reader—some elusive part of myself that can begin to see the piece as a separate human might see it, and who emerges despite the impossibility of her own existence. That is, I can’t be an impartial reader of something I myself wrote; I can’t unsee the process that brought me to this moment. But eventually, if I’m careful, I can at least get enough distance to realize, say, that a certain line from Ellis just won’t snap into the puzzle, regardless of its beauty. And I think it’s the reader who contributes flashes of insight about how to order things. It’s as though she’s staring for a long time at a sequence of numbers before finally realizing they’re out of order: 1, 3, 2, 5, 4. And at a stroke she sees how to rearrange them, and it all falls into place.
Despite their very different dispositions, these three eventually needed to sit down at the same mental table and answer some deeper questions about the significance of this poem and how it functioned. Was it earning its place? Was it managing to say something?
The writer became more and more subdued as this process moved along. She harbored, as always, a belief that more is more, but the editor and the reader were slowly convincing her to let go of things she loved. And, like any loss, it hurt. Once in a while she was permitted to insert a new word or even a whole line, and that helped a little. But in truth she was already longing to begin the next poem, leaving the editor to finish up the unsavory work of declaring the current poem finished.
Thus the cycle continues. Regardless of whether the editor can ever find an endpoint that meets her standards for both craft and propriety, regardless of whether the inner reader ever feels delight and satisfaction, the writer just wants to start the process, just wants the joy of it. For all its hazards, collage is play—a way of loving the world.
The History of Creation / December 14
Lines on my forehead when barely arisen—but I don’t “arise,” nothing nice like that, I do many separate, clumsy things to get from bed to mirror.
Woken into one of the longest nights, well before dawn.
A car passes, a verb
between murmur and wash.
How many on this seaboard are awake right now?
As we live we fight sluggishness, in dark seats, in raincoats.
Bringing a candle,
intending to sing a minute, alone.
At first a voice cried against the darkness,
and the voice grew loud enough to stir black waters.
But no—even before that, all these photos existed: the man missing his legs, the couple crushed by a blast, the girl nearly melted out of her ribs.
Her eyes were peaceful, but her eyes were resigned. She died soon after.
It is impossible or wrong to stay up late with The Year In Pictures, then grant oneself sleep.
When a child starves, is it a special case.
He shall never have existed.
My flame inside a jelly jar, this slender rainbow cast onto the formica.
Out of nothing he created himself, the light—
and it is also true that one may be swallowed
into nothing, into history, and gradually too—
The light flew back and he saw the light was himself.
The light withdrew and she saw herself as a negative space, enfolding the smoke.
Raindrops on the darkness of the roof, the heater loudly at work, at work, making possible my particulars. In this day after the night of the suffering pictures.
Do you know magic? Can you utter the name of your soul and bring yourself back to light?
While still prone this morning, I thought of how the doll’s eyes clacked opened and shut.
I am the skin he takes on and sheds.
I am his excrement. I am his forms.
Now each time I look up the blue has lightened, the morning has grown,
headlights make the wet windows sparkle.
And I’ve seen truth piled up like the thin, worn-out husks of men, skins cast off at the door of the tomb.
And the trees push forward against the sky, black with rain, leaning as determined by their places on the hill.
All lines in italics are excerpted from Awakening Osiris ©1988 by Normandi Ellis, used with permission from Red Wheel Weiser, LLC Newburyport, MA, www.redwheelweiser.com.
Erika Howsare has published prose and poetry in Fence, Verse, Conjunctions, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Millions, and other outlets. Her second book, How Is Travel a Folded Form? appeared in 2018 from Saddle Road Press. She lives in Virginia, where she's at work on a nonfiction book about deer.