Collage Poetry #1

Collage

The art of making a picture with various materials or objects…

stuck onto a larger surface.

Poetry

A piece of writing in which the words are arranged in separate lines,

often ending in rhyme, and are chosen for their sound and for the

images and ideas they suggest.

Considering these two definitions put forward by the Cambridge Dictionary, Collage Poetry to me is the art of making a piece of writing whereby words are cut out or made out of different material. These elements are then put together creating new images and meaning whilst considering visual shape and the symbolism of individual or a combination of words to evoke feeling and/or an idea. The symbols/text can be arranged on separate lines but not necessarily so.

Collage and writing poetry have both been part of my creative practice for many years. I have incorporated text into my assemblage and collage artworks i.e. from magazines and newspapers as a background. If I collage words to make a poem, I first write the poem then find words or letters that are appropriate. I’ve never created collage poetry in a somewhat random sense and thought this blog was an excellent opportunity to have a go.

I chose the BBC Wildlife Magazine, August 2006, for this exercise selecting a headline from 21 different pages.

I then chose the first word of each headline and started exploring creatively. I followed this by cutting out the last two words and had a bit of a play.

Finally I cut out all the words from the headlines and made attempts to create some writing that made some sort of sense. I didn’t put pressure on myself to use all the words. The first end result I believe was influenced by current tragic world events.

The second one turned out to be a bit of fun...

The third one, well, I'll leave that up to the reader:

I found the outcome really interesting and thought I'd have another go with the BBC Wildlife Magazine, July 2006. I carried on with the same process using 15 headlines this time.

My first attempt at making a poem yet again turned out to be seemingly influenced by events in Eastern Europe.

Since I used wildlife magazines and the given text, it's no surprise that nature-themed poems were also an outcome. 

Finally, I collected all the leftover words from both headlines, separated them out and categorised them by nouns, verbs, adverbs etc. which led me down a Google rabbit hole and revisiting lessons in grammar rediscovering words like determiners (five types), conjunctions, articles amongst others. This mess of individual words taken out of their original context and the exercise of separating them out by function highlighted what role the words had to play in making meaning. It was helping to make sense of a giant puzzle. The cut out words both inspired and directed ideas, whilst my past experience and intuition played a part in selecting, grouping and assembling. During the process the lack of certain words available also affected how the poems were constructed.

Here are the final results.

Just like fitting in that last piece to complete a challenging jigsaw, producing these poems has been very satisfying.

Thank you for reading. KEW 😀