Collage Recipe: Firsts and Lasts, Ones and Threes

Here's a collage recipe that results in a poem comprised of couplets (their number determined only by how many books you use).

It's a two-part process that will have you 1) opening every book to the same page and extracting two lines to create a couplet, and 2) imposing some kind of order on the lines that are subsequently, arbitrarily, collected. Here's how:

- Put together a pile books. (More than you'll end out using so that you can discard some once you begin. For ex: if you plan on 8, start with 12.)
- Pick a book (*more on this below).
- Turn to page 15 of the book.
- Extract the last line of the first paragraph on the page. This is the couplet's first line.
- Extract the first line of the third paragraph on the page. This is the couplet's second line.
- Repeat for each book in your pile, until you have extracted couplets from every book. Retain the order of the lines, first to last.
- (Optional: if you'd like, return to the first book and extract a single line from anywhere on that same page. Use this as the concluding line of your poem.)

There is such a high degree of arbitrariness to the above process that I try to balance it next with an imposition of my will on the raw material. To my tastes, collage works best when it strikes a balance between chaos and order, between random and reasoned. Here's how I find the balance, or force some order, in this method:

- Don't start randomly. Browse through the books looking for a strong opening line. Constrain yourself to page #15 and to extracting specific lines, but allow the freedom to read lines before choosing the first book.
- Try to weave a mosaic of books, somehow. The meaning is broad, but the general rule of thumb is: compile a set of books that somehow connect to each other (for ex., different sides of the same subject), or balance each other (different genres), or somehow -- anyhow -- weave a mosaic in the field of possibilities.
- Allow yourself the freedom to switch pronouns ("he" to "she" or vice versa, etc.) in order to establish some kind of narrative thread through the lines.
- Allow freedom with line breaks. In order words, feel free to sculpt the raw product of 8 or so couplets by choosing where, exactly, it might make more sense to use line breaks.
- Allow freedom to delete one or two words, if their absence improves things.
- Similarly, if it makes more sense, when extracting lines from your book, allow the freedom to take phrases instead of whole sentences. One couplet can run into the other. (The result is a series of couplets that are not self-contained, ghazal-like, but blend one into the other. A sentence begun in one book is ended in another.)
- If the lines you're using (last of first para, first of third para) are truly horrendous, don't use the book. Or, if a line nearby is amazing, use that instead. (Try not to do this for every book -- but if it must, let it happen).
- If you only have short lines, use as many of them as necessary to match the line length of the other couplets.

Example:

I wrote a series of these poems recently using "Africa" is a broad motif to guide the work. I found the most success when deciding carefully which collection of books to put together - what universe of possibilities to create. In one example, I had at least four books to do with the genocide in Rwanda - all different. One was a novel, another a collection of testimonials by survivors, another was Philip Gourevitch's moving book on the subject. I balanced this with a randomly chosen novel from a distinctly different region in Africa, as well as Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and a collection of Lawrence Weschler essays ("Vermeer in Bosnia") -- the eponymous essay to do in part with art and war crimes tribunals in the Hague. To me, so much of this work is about Representation, and the collection seemed to capture that. I switched a pronoun from "he" to "she" to connect an earlier image with a later couplet. And I took liberties with phrases and line breaks so that, for example, two distinct fragments from separate books came together as:

The dead/ looked like pictures of the dead and even then// under a continual threat of being overwhelmed once again."

(The result of this example will appear in Five Fingers Review 24 "Foreign Lands and Alternate Universes"...)

-Adrian