Quotations on Collage
“A good stealer is ipso facto a good inventor.”
-- Marianne Moore, notebook entry
"Collage construction enables images to become a form of thinking."
-- Charles Altieri, "The Objectivist Tradition."
[M]any diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, we shall prevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it is intended to call up.
--Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics
One uses form as a musician uses sound. One does not imitate the wood dove, or at least one does not confine oneself to the imitation of wood-doves, one combines and arranges one’s sound or one’s forms into Bach fugues or into arrangements of colour, or into "planes in relation.”
--Ezra Pound, on sculptural form
Collage composition, as it developed simultaneously in France, Italy, and Russia (and slightly later in Germany and Anglo-America) is distinguished from the "paste-ups" of the nineteenth century in that it always involves the transfer of materials from one context to another, even as the original context cannot be erased.
--Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment
Each cited element breaks the continuity or the linearity of the discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality. The trick of collage consists also of never entirely suppressing the alterity of these elements reunited in a temporary composition.
--Group Mu Manifesto
In our reading experience of quoting poems the formal properties of the quotation precede and define their conceptual content, showing that the quotation is indeed unparaphrasable. Texture asserts the idiosyncratic rather than the interchangeable. Texture does not just define the sounds of a group of words, it has consequences. It shows how these sounds point to and are part of those words’ individual, nonparaphrasable meanings. Texture also implies a quotation’s history, its past, “original” use and this original use’s earlier appropriations by culture.
-- Leonard Diepeveen, Changing Voices: The Modern Quoting Poem
-ST
