At OmniVerse: Keith Waldrop's Collage Work

At OmniVerse, "A Matter of Collage," by Keith Waldrop, originally printed in Several Gravities (Siglio Press, 2009). The piece is luminous for those interested in collage as composition. Writing of his first book, A Windmill Near Calvary: "My Windmill does not qualify as a collage book, although—like most of my work—it has collage elements." More:

It was later, in the eighties, that I came closer, in Transcendental Studies (now published by the University of California Press); the middle section of that volume, “Falling in Love Through a Description,” is a series of twenty-nine poems. For each of them, I had taken three or four books as sources (all of them prose and all very different: e.g., a novel, a religious book, or whatever came to hand). I stole words or phrases—very seldomly a whole sentence—until I had a stanza. If that was, let’s say, a four line stanza, I kept making four line stanzas from the same books until it felt like enough. Then I typed up the newly arrived poem, rearranging the stanzas alphabetically.

The words from these books were chosen, so not absolutely random, but chosen quickly, paying as little attention as possible to content or context, much attention to sound. Once the words had become lines and stanzas, I felt at liberty to change words, to throw out stanzas or lines—in short, to revise—since my purpose was not to demonstrate possibilities of collage, but simply to find poems.

By that time I had piled up many collages of cardboard and paper, occasionally cloth or wood. (As with the poems, I never hesitated to add to them—with pencil or gouache or whatever came to hand.) Their first public showing was in Providence in 1979. Like the poems, these were made of materials as disparate as possible, picked because I liked their looks or, really, because they somehow called out to me.

Obviously such practice involves a great deal of chance: what materials turn up, what strikes the attention . . . But—except for things like alphabetic arrangement—there was really very little of the sort of “chance procedure” found in John Cage’s work or Jackson Mac Low’s (works I relish). Almost always, rather, it was “mon plaisir.”

I have always written rather little, but endlessly revised. To the extent that I employ collage, I have the happy possibility of revising what I haven’t written.

The cycle mentioned above, “Falling in Love Through a Description,” was published some years ago in a French translation by the excellent translator Françoise de Laroque. She noticed that in each poem the stanzas were alphabetical and said she would try to make them come out that way in her version. I insisted she do no such thing, that—in- stead—she should translate each stanza as seemed right, then rearrange the French stanzas alphabetically. I found the result admirable.

What an artist snitches (not necessarily from a work of art) will, in its new setting, sit somewhere on a line between collage and quotation. While in a specific instance these may be hard to distinguish, they are different uses. A quote keeps something of its own character and is read (or, in a painting, seen) as transcribed from elsewhere. A collage element, losing its substance, becomes part of a new texture and its former connections may be lost completely.

Read all about it at Omniverse. Also not to be missed are visual works from Norma Cole's Tahiti Series, and even more visuals from Robert Fernandez, Andrea Baker, and Pablo Lopez.