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ON COLLAGE
from an interview with Keith Waldrop by Peter Gizzi
Originally published in The Germ and forthcoming in a collection of essays Real Shadows by Keith Waldrop, Salt Publishers, 2010. Copyright © 2000 Keith Waldrop and Peter Gizzi. All rights reserved. Used with permission of the authors.
PG: How do you think of your collage work? You don't say "my writing is first and my visual collage is second." Do you consider them together?
KW: I do one thing, I do another thing.
PG: How many collages do you think you've made in your life?
KW: I don't know. Once when I was going away somewhere, I threw them in boxes, unmatted, just to get them out of the way. That was years ago and I remember counting something like 600 at the time. Now there must be over a thousand. I've sold a few and given some away.
PG: Yes we have several on our walls.
KW: I do them very fast. It's odd that I do those fast and poems slowly, although it seems to me a similar process. I've occasionally gone back to a collage that I did years before and worked some more on it, but not very often.
PG: In the preface of your selected poems, The Opposite of Letting the Mind Wander, you talk about your preoccupation with collage. In fact you go so far as to say that collage is your "great delight" and that it is a practice you keep coming back to. Later in the preface you say that the last words of a dying individual is a genre you came to love. You say "I think it suggests the ideal poem: not good or bad, but final; not determined by what it says -- or even how it says it -- but by the blank which follows."
I am interested in two questions here on the nature of collage.
The first consideration is the interrelation of the two points above; in what way does your preoccupation with collage consist of a kind of recovery or recombination of finality, and do the materials you arrange in your collages fill or address that "blank which follows"?
The second consideration, which might be closer to the point is: how does your work as a translator relate to your practice of collage? Meaning, in what way do you consider your work as a collage artist (verbal and visual, since you are fluent in both mediums) to constitute a task of translation? Perhaps even a more significant act of translation?
KW: Collage is not a form of translation, or vice versa, but they're related. Translation and collage are both movements from one surface to another. In translation, one takes a poem, subtracts all its words -- and refills it with other words, words of a different language.
There is, you'll notice, a hole in the middle of that statement. If the words are removed, there is no longer a poem there. It isn't a matter of keeping a form and changing the content -- as Pope takes a satire from ancient Rome and puts in eighteenth century English people and events. It's keeping (trying to keep) a formal structure that depends entirely on what you are removing -- the words. If you think about that too long or too deeply, you tend to give it all up.
Nevertheless, this is what happens. The original poem becomes, for the translator, an abstract, a model, an empty form, a ghost form. (By "form" I don't mean, of course, verse-form, metrical form. I mean the form of a particular poem, as opposed to all other poems, what makes it different from all others-its personality.) The new words, to the extent that the translation is successful, echo the original (bound to be, to some extent, unsuccessful.)
Collage is the opposite movement. It takes words (dealing now with collage poems.) and removes them from their context and therefore from the form which they were part of. Some residue of that form may cling to them, but if too much remains, it's not collage but quotation. (Eliot's "To Carthage then I came. . ." is a reference to Augustine, not a collage element. Pound's "number two in most rivers" is a collage element, since the fly-casting catalog he got it from is not a point of reference -- even though it clarifies the meaning of the words. [I thought for years that the line meant that most rivers were full of shit and was puzzled that the tonal quality of that line and those around it didn't somehow go with that meaning.])
A translation has an original it is working from and to. That's why translating a poem is so much harder than simply writing a poem: one has all the same difficulties, plus the necessity of respecting the original. A collage doesn't have an original.
As for my own use of collage: the elements I use are usually short and from widely varying sources, and generally neither the tone nor the meaning of the original text survives the transfer. I almost never use poems as source-material, since in that case the words would be liable to carry too much across. And I don't (usually) use elements discretely, but blend or overlap them, or embed them in other material. And, especially in recent years, I have -- after putting my elements together -- revised the resulting structure without regard for the elements as such.
Any utterance uses words we've gotten somewhere -- we don't make them up, don't make them from scratch for each new sentence, but simply put them together differently. I assume this is well known. Cf. "All writing is collage" in the Evans-Moxley Dictionary of Received Ideas. Or as Gertrude Stein said, somewhat earlier, things stay the same, but the composition varies.
As for finality: well, I don't believe in finality, except in the sense that what's gone is gone and when we're gone, we're gone. That's final enough. It has little to do with our poems (though all my poems seem to have to do with it). I'm not sure death is the mother of beauty, but without it -- without, that is, its prospect-nothing would be serious, since it could always be done over. Of course, it can be done over -- and probably will be -- but by then it'll be somebody else's collage-element. Or not. Maybe what interests me is the interruption, which at best makes a notch in time-of the sort that might be expressed by "That couldn't have been written at any other time" or, better, "Nobody else could have written that" or even just "Well, that's the way they used to write."
PG: Would you say that this idea of revision or collage is an act of recuperation, a restructuring or rearranging of what would be linear time?
KW: I've sometimes been irritated by people "reading" my collages. "This looks like. . ." is not objectionable, but "This means . . ." makes little sense to me. It's hard to carry this across verbatim into the verbal collages, since I would hardly want to say, "Don't read my poems, just look at them." But something maybe like "Read what it says, not what it means" might be an analog. Or better: Vygotsky distinguished between 'meaning' and 'sense': the 'sense' of a word or text being everything a word or text does, all its effect whether intellectual or emotional or whatever. 'Meaning' being the central, more or less definite content -- what, in some cases, you'd go to a dictionary for. So that meaning is a part of sense, but only a part. Vygotsky says that our "inner speech" emphasizes sense at the expense of meaning. I once applied that idea to Gertrude Stein's writing, but I think it's a useful notion for art in general. A translation, for instance, that brings across only the meaning of a poem or novel is not adequate, is only a start. And to explicate or "figure out" a poem, without really listening to it, is to avoid the poem, to short-circuit it.
To get back to your question, collage is certainly rearranging things. And often, in my case, using elements that might otherwise be thrown away. Old posters or. . . whatever. Or memories that could be thrown away. What do you do with memories, that in many cases hardly seem worth writing down. But as an element of collage . . .
PG: You've talked about the feeling intellect. Would you go so far as to call those memories emotions?
KW: I suppose Pound (or Jung) would say they are feeling-toned. I think the idea that intellect and feeling are opposites is a helpful abstraction; they're abstractly separable. In any concrete case, they're not. Feeling seems to me a broader concept than intellect, which is to some extent a subdivision of feeling. I don't mean by this to depreciate intelligence. I'm appalled by the long-standing anti-intellectual attitude that became fashionable in the sixties. (Do I remember right, was it really Norman O. Brown who said that his students were thinking too much? Could he have been serious?) But I cherish Whitehead's formulation, that the proposition (the intellectual process) should be a "lure for feeling."
Speaking of Whitehead, I take seriously his claim (he is arguing the kinship of poetry and philosophy): "Our understanding outruns the ordinary usages of words."
PG: In your note to Hugot on collage: I felt your discussion of Ernst's practice to be a useful working definition of Surrealism, that is -- "recombining old images, creating chimeric figures and events," and putting them into "a new space -- often a sinister or threatening space, a space congenial to archetypes, with a place for phantom desires and fairy tale fears." Which is to say, it places the reader in an empathetic relation to the material; or the form of the collage gives them a location to displace their own emotional content.
On the other hand, in Schwitters -- whose technique, I agree, is closer to the charmed sense of subjective displacement in the narrative surface of your poems -- t he organization of the materials is in itself an abstraction; it is read at a distance, so the space into which the reader is drawn is purely foreign, a free "delight" [a free "enjoyment of a composition"] since it is not readily filled with one's own narrative content. The materials often seem salvaged from commonplace narrative uselessness (a ticket stub, a snip of paper) into possibility. In and of themselves the forms are uninhabited, and the process of composition begins with a taking away -- the taking away of ready content.
In your explanation of your translation process you say that you take a poem and "subtract all the words -- and refill it with other words." You note the vacuum that is created and go as far to say that the shape is a "ghost form." Could you comment on that shape or space and how would you characterize it? I am thinking of Ezra Pound's concept of the "vortex" and the sense that words are drawn back into the void of the translator's making. So the primary labor is one of erasing, of emptying a place for the words of another language to come into. And the real bravery of translation would be the careful erasure of original content without the loss of original form [as deeply bound to its origin].
KW: I think this is part of a more general question: Where does it come from, where do we get, the energy to "create"? And all I can say is that it seems to me to come from the desire of the thing to be created.
To ask why someone writes is usually a red herring. One may write because of emotion or because of moral need or because a bill is coming due or to explain an idea or because of some whim, and those "causes" may well leave their traces in the poem. But the poem is in the words of the poem-in their relations, internal and external. In one sense, the words of the poem belong to the poem. In another sense, they belong to the language the poem is written in and to the world that language is part of. There is no mystical substance behind the words. There is no key, since there is no lock. And there is no psychological state behind it, because when the poem is done, the poet is dead.
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