I'm going to paste in the review I just wrote of two books written in collage form. It's 7 1/2 pages long, perhaps too long for blogging. If it looks like a space hog, I'll take it off again. Anyway, hope you folks find it of some interest.
Eleni Sikelianos, The Book of Jon, San Francisco: City Lights. 2004. 116 pp. $11.95.
Mark Nowak. Shut Up Shut Down. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 2004. 161 pp. $15.00. Afterward by Amiri Baraka.
In the past century, collage has gone from revolutionary method to creative writing exercise, seemingly without losing any of its force. The first and second flushes of High Modernism can be measured by and against T.S. Eliot’s gathering of fragments against ruin in The Waste Land and William Carlos Williams’s documentary history of a New Jersey city in Paterson. Many decades later, in her excellent textbook of experimental writing pedagogy, The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing (Allen & Unwin, 2005), Hazel Smith offers up a six stage recipe for the collage poem. On her list of tools required for collage work are “a large piece of paper and a pair of scissors,” along with “texts you have recently been reading.” As Smith points out, such work, based on juxtaposition, emphasizes discontinuity even as it suggests relation. The collage worker sews or pastes a text together, but does not conceal the seams, or their punnish seemings. If, in New Critical terms, poetry is always puzzle, then collage pushes us further, into the territory of reader-response criticism, where the reader is given the detective’s task of piecing clues together. Hence the staying power of this form of forms, which answers a theorist’s requirements whether that theorist be old or new fashioned. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, whose title emphasizes the givenness of language, invokes various puzzles of genre, gender, history, race, and language. The contemporary collage poem comes in a remarkably flexible form, one capable of containing many matters, many arguments.
The collage is also amenable to self-reflexivity, meta-collage. Eleni Sikelianos writes her poetics of the collage a third of the way into her mixed memoir, The Book of Jon: “None of these stories will stitch up into a seamless blanket to cover this family’s tracks. In this story, all the fissures show, they bulge scarlike, they come apart at the seams or they were never sewn up in the first place” (29) Toward the end of this same expansive sentence, she describes “the snaking lines of those beautifully colored cartographer’s maps coming unhinged from their borders and uncoiling away off the page, disappearing into the aethers” (30) Even her (mixed) metaphors appear pasted together from various texts, incorporating verbs of stitching, bulging, coming apart, snaking, unhinging, uncoiling and disappearing, even as the nouns they move include a blanket, fissures, scars, seams, maps and pages. But what is oddest about this passage is her definition of family story as one that conceals, rather than unveils. She alludes to “stories’ that might “cover this family’s tracks,” not track down its histories. This odd and troubling conjunction of family stories as revelations, as tightly kept secrets, and simply as unknowns, is the engine that runs this poetic memoir from ignorance to an untotalizing kind of knowledge of kin(d.)
Sikelianos’s subject is her father, Jon, whom she hardly knew as child or as adult. While the poet, in her “introductory note,” suggests that her story is part of a much “longer family history,” this book (fails to) tell the story of her recovery of Jon. While Sikelianos was not adopted, her story mirrors many by adoptees who have sought their birthparents, only to meet with mixed joys and disappointments. Because what strikes Sikelianos most about her family history is not what has been given, her but what is missing: “It matters that there are holes in a family history that can never be filled, that there are secrets and mysteries, migrations and invasions and murky blood-lines. These stories speak of human history” (x).
Jon the man was as various and as fragmented as any collage about him can be. He was a young father, serial husband, lifelong drug addict, comedian, adventurer, rogue, and ultimately a tragic figure. Sikelianos’s memoir incorporates meditative prose; poetry; lists of stories to tell; lists of stories and dreams that are told swiftly; letters sent and unsent; plans for a film about Jon; photographs of Jon and Eleni, together and apart; “shreds of stories,” true and false; an obituary published after his death (unlike any obit I’ve ever seen in a newspaper), and more. It’s as if the poverty of the poet’s experience with her father pushes her into creative over-drive.
As anyone who has written about family knows, the subject is at once titillating (what could be a better “story” than many family secrets?) and dangerous (who could get angrier than one whose secret has been published?). Sikelianos’s search, her choice of genre even, is ethical; she comes up short, over and again, at locating the “truth” of her father’s life. “The truth of the matter is I hardly know my father, as it always has been, as it always will be. He would cry if he read that sentence. As I am crying as I write it” (34). Hers is a double grief, both for her father and his stories, not because she knows them but because she can never do so. So the crucial question Sikelianos poses is, “What is it I want from this story?” What she wants is a narrative without gaps, a conventional story about a conventional man: “My father stops being a bum, straightens up and flies right, gets a blue-and-white-striped shirt and gives up heroin. He gets a job at a zoo, and he loves it” (32). At the end of this fantasy, which is not broken, fragmented, but of a piece, Sikelianos writes: “In this story . . . he told me the stories of when he was a child, so that I knew the names of his dogs, his peeves, his adventures and his loves” (33).
For Sikelianos, then, collage represents layered absences, the absence of a father who has died, the absence of a father when he was alive, and the absence of that father’s stories. This is a beautiful book, beautifully written, but the definition of collage that governs it is no different from the typical puzzle / detective template that many collage pieces have performed over the past century. Mark Nowak’s book Shut Up Shut Down, while less lyrical, does suggest new uses for the collage form. For Nowak uses collage not to denote gaps, but to fill them in, not to mourn absences but to show that apparent absences are merely that, appearances. Like a skilled conspiracy theorist, Nowak joins together voices that are usually torn apart and offers up a searing indictment of contemporary corporate and governmental structures and deeds. His project, like Sikelianos’s, is ethical, but his ethics are more public than private, so there is very little “Nowak” in these collage-pieces, except as arranger or as DJ and perhaps as the occasional, unnamed “I.” One might call these pieces acts of paranoia, except that they seem so utterly true.
Nowak grew up in a working class family in Buffalo, New York, a once-thriving lake city that now features ruins like a sculpture outside the abandoned art deco train station across from where Nowak grew up (which photograph appears on Nowak’s first book of poems from Coffee House), Revenants. While his strategic and formal poetic passions are “experimental” (he is writing collage, after all), the passions that drive his poems’ content are not the leaves of grass so much as their roots. He wears the hat of a labor organizer, among his many, and this book testifies to his working class anger at those who hold power, whether that power is economic or linguistic.
So let me turn to the poem that most explicitly joins Nowak’s poetic and social concerns, namely “Capitalization,” a poem in 17 parts, with (as with other poems in this book) an extensive Works Cited. The word “capital” is a flag. One thinks of capitalism and its primary critic, Karl Marx; one thinks equally of letters, which ones commence with capitals and which do not. And so, ultimately, one thinks about authority, its uses and abuses. Section 1 of “Capitalization” thus begins with what could only come from The Elements of Grammar by one Margaret Shertzer, published in 1986, not coincidentally, one imagines, toward the end of the Reagan administration, with its ironic project of “de-regulation.”
Capitalize the first word
of every sentence, whether or not
it is a complete sentence.
Capitalize the first word of every line
of poetry.
Nowak is obviously not going to follow these rules, given that his lines of poetry begin with miniscules. And then, one might think, given the collage form, we will get a gap, a hole in the text for the reader to fill. No, Nowak will also break the rules of reader-response, fill-in-the-holes, collage-eality, moving immediately into a bold- (or bald-) faced quote by a worker:
I started work
on an assembly line
at the huge Westinghouse plant
in East Pittsburgh when I was sixteen.
The work was dull and repetitive.
The speaker here may be the poet’s father; earlier in the book we learned that “my father ran for (and was elected) vice president of his Westinghouse union” (19). In any case, labor unions are obviously a part of Nowak’s lived experience, crucial stays against the corporation. What follows in this first section of Nowak’s poem is an enacted poetics for his book as a whole: the grammar text is followed by the worker’s words, written to follow “good grammar.” Those words are then followed by a statement that Ronald Reagan served as host for “G.E. Theater”; by an edict about capitalization in English poetry; by a brief comment that Reagan once played an FBI agent who infiltrated communist organizations; by another sentence by the worker; by a grammar aid to addressing one’s parents; by a description of Reagan’s tours of G.E. factories and his attacks on “The swiftly rising tide / of collectivism that threatens to inundate / what remains of our free economy”; and by the worker again, describing his efforts to fantasize himself somewhere other than at his dull job. That Reagan could so easily equate “collectivism” with “communism” testifies to a terrible slander against unions, ultimately put into action by none other than Pres. Ronald Reagan.
To make a long poem short (I highly recommend reading the poem in its entirety), this is a poem about how Ronald Reagan, as president, fired the air traffic controllers, destroying their union:
Any doubt remaining as to
the Reagan Administration’s attitude
toward those who dared to defy it
was erased in march 1982.
and several lines later, a worker’s voice, again in bold, a typographical feature that is now itself a repository of what—anger, pity, helplessness in the face of governmental action:
One time I as organizing the union.
Next I was selling eggs.
How did that happen? (60)
In a list of words that are no longer capitalized, listed several lines later, one finds two of the primary foci of Nowak’s critique, namely “poor whites” and “English literature.”
Nowak’s work of small-l “literature” offers us a democratization of the collage form, as well as—ironically—a re-authorizing of the Arranger (to cite a famous Joyce non-character). For Nowak democratizes the form, better known for its elite users (Eliot, Pound, even Williams, Stein) than for its proletarian ones. But as he does so, he shuts the door (goes on strike?) on the reader (the corporate consumer?) who has come to expect that with the collage come gaps, holes, the places in which to roam. Nowak might suggest that these holes, like any feature of contemporary art and culture, have themselves become commodified, that they no longer offer the reader the freedom that Language poet Ron Silliman advocates (even as his collages are not all that reader-friendly). He has shut the collage down, to paraphrase his own title, in order to show ways in which workers have been “shut up” by voices that speak, almost literally, next to them. Reagan and the PATCO worker speak to the same microphone, as it were; we simply don’t (are not allowed to—by government, by corporations, by the media) hear them in the same breath. Nowak would oblige us to close that breath, to understand the banal evils of authority, governmental and grammatical.
I have no idea if the political blogger, Billmon (billmon.org) has read the works of Sikelianos or Nowak. But since his rebirth, after months of frustrated silence, as a composer of collage-works, Billmon has offered many lacerating critiques of the media (Fox in particular), government, and other contemporary corporate villains, via this avant-garde methodology. Behind Billmon’s anger, one senses that something has been lost; as Sikelianos would argue, it is perhaps our ability to write a coherent (liberal) narrative. That political critique now appears in the guise of poetry can only promise that there is yet life in both modes of discourse: political and poetic.
