The Poem in Waiting

Collage Poetry

fs3633ct15 - 10 x 8.5 inches - collage on magazine paper

The Poem in Waiting

At the end of my journal, beyond the finished entries and sketches of thought, lies a territory I think of as the scrap-yard of possibility. Pages of collected fragments, random lines I have copied and pasted from whatever I happen to be reading: stray phrases, overheard cadences, curious snippets that catch at the ear. I gather them the way a beachcomber gathers shells. Not because they belong to me, but because they gleam.

This practice turns reading into a form of writing. I am never “just” reading, never merely consuming someone else’s words. The act of copying a phrase into my journal is already a creative gesture. It says: this line belongs in the storehouse, this thread belongs in the loom. By collecting in this way, I am always, in some quiet sense, working on a poem.

Over time, the pile of fragments grows. A hundred disjointed bits, with no direct connection between them. Yet, like flocks of birds that suddenly veer into shape, something begins to stir among them. I start to notice certain phrases leaning toward one another, certain moods repeating, certain images echoing. A theme begins to emerge, and I follow it.

This is when the real arranging begins: selecting, cutting, recombining, setting one line against another until sparks appear. The poem doesn’t start with a blank page but with an already-crowded page, a cacophony that slowly resolves into music. Toward the end of the process, I look for a rhythm of beginning, middle, and end. Something with the faint skeleton of narrative, even if abstract.

It feels less like “writing” than like listening. Less like creating than like arranging. I am not inventing material, but shaping what is already at hand. The combinations of words existed before me. I merely identified and isolated them. My role is to let them encounter each other, to make space for their collisions and harmonies.

This way of working changes how I think of authorship. A poem is not the expression of my personal voice, but a field where many voices meet. I am a kind of custodian, or composer or perhaps a gardener, coaxing seeds that have landed together into a strange new garden.

When I look back, what surprises me most is how inevitable the final poem often feels. The scattered fragments, once arranged, seem to insist: we were always heading here.

And so I trust the process. I keep collecting scraps, faithfully adding to that final section of the journal. Because I know that sooner or later, the poem already waiting inside them will reveal itself.

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Recently I have been experimenting with pasting some of these poems into chatGPT as a prompt and asking Chatwick to invent a story using the text of the poem. Interestingly I have been getting some results that I really like. I then take this draft of the story and develop it which ever way seems best. So, this becomes another layer of collage making. Instead of a collage poem, it becomes a collage narrative. Pushing it further, I might then come up with several narratives from several poems and then combine them together into an extended story.

I might then have the character write the poem at the end as an expression of their experience in the story but in actuality their experience in the story is a result of the poem that generated the narrative the character experienced.