Collage

peter clark

I love collage.

Bits and pieces that seem to have no relation to one another coming together to create a whole that was unimaginable before all the bits and pieces came together just so. Like a puzzle, but not. I love puzzles, too.

"Found poetry" was something I played at a little during high school that I remembered this evening listening to this lovely conversation between Carolyn Forche and Michael Ondaatje. Very near the end of the interview the term "literary collage" is used and Michael exclaims that he loves collage. Some scholarly or critical writing about another of my favorite writers, Annie Dillard, introduced me to the idea of "literary collage" a while back, but that tidbit was tucked away in the folds of my gray matter until hearing the descriptor used again this evening.

And suddenly a bunch of pieces slipped to the front of my brain, but they did not assemble themselves into any order.

I will not attempt to connect the pieces tonight, but I have to save these bits here for assemblage another time:

-My friend is flying to Texas tomorrow to visit her parents.

-My niece is arriving here tomorrow on the evening train.

-Semi-trucks were flying today in tornadoes in Texas.

-A semi-truck tried to kill me in 2008, but failed.

-"It's a twister, Auntie Em!" "There's no place like home."

-Earlier I was looking at the pitch of the blade on the ceiling fan above my bed, thinking about propellers, when the roar of a military jet passed over my house.

-The fragments and torn pieces of my life hold art beyond my current imagination. Let them fly around and maybe they will land on something wicked.

-Striped socks are fun.

-Birds can fly.

-I used to think I was a cat person, but I'm really a dog person.

That's all for now.