How to make Collage Poetry
My process for constructing poetry
Collage Poetry, what is that? Collage poetry has been around in various forms and using various techniques for a long time. You can go to any search engine and search the term ‘collage poetry’ or ‘history of collage poetry’ and research it yourself.
I am only going to talk about my own methodology that I have been developing over the last 20+ years.
One of the things I personally like about collage is that I am working with bits and pieces of pre-existing material that I usually didn’t make myself. I like interacting with found materials and composing with pre-existing parts that I can select from.
My creative angle is how I go about determining what materials to collect and make collages with and how to go about composing them.
If I am making a physical collage, often working with texts, I typically reduce the text to abstraction by cutting up the lettering into unreadable bit that don’t make literary noise in your mind as you look at or ‘read’ them. Many of this works I regard as poems and are often constructed in a way to suggest poetic form.
I might then make typographic abstraction paintings based on some of these works such as below.
Written Collage Poetry
My written poetry has also 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, my written poetry is an exercise in collage. Being a collage artist, I construct snippets and clippings of phrases and lines of text garnered from the emails I receive on a daily basis 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 use throughout 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.
As far as gathering material aside from whatever comes my way randomly, I will often to searches on a search engine using peculiar arrangements of keyword phrases like for instance: repugnant josephson chocolate Using this search term, which I also used for the title of the poem, I went through the resulting pages and gathered phrases and then arranged them into a poem. Often a narrative starts to emerge and then I might keep that developing narrative in mind as I continue collecting material.
repugnant josephson chocolate
Silly, all you'd find in my soul is whipped cream and melting fudge chocolate.
Our children drink hot chocolate and wear their pajamas inside out.
When eaten with a side dish of a tablespoon of peanut butter, it is a very nutritious.
Remember to be considerate of others and lick your spoon clean.
Of course all these actions encourage the terrorism coming from the government
the people least able to bring up children in a modern society
killing innocent and defenseless people all around the world.
I'm sitting here looking at a pic. of a DEAD 6 YEAR OLD
I have recently received large numbers of photographs of horrendous birth deformities
Parents strap bombs on children for them to blow themselves up.
There has not, and I repeat not, been any digital alteration
BIGGEST THREAT TO THE PEOPLE OF THE U.S.A. IS THE U.S. GOVERNMENT
Tyranny is nothing new
it's going to jump all over your head and go COCK-A-DOODLE DOOOO !!!!
with a new insight on things.
At the time I was also experimenting with audio collage and this poem was published in the online publication textsound.org Issue 8 :: February 2010
I have also hunted around for things and used random text generators, Markov text chain generators and so forth. Sometimes I don’t even remember where or how I got certain material since over the years I might sit down at the computer any time of the day or night and start working. So over the years I have slowly tried to notate the sources of where things came from and the exact date of when a poem was completed so that I can keep works in chronological order at least in my journal. I think this extra information makes the work more interesting.
Then, when I get the urge to publish a book I will then select poems from my journal that seem to go together or were made with the same methodology or type of material in order to end up with a cohesive document. I usually have the idea of a book in mind when I am working on different ideas.
You can find my poetry books here
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Do you make collage poetry? Comment below.