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February 1, 2006

A Verbal Collage and a Gift from Yeats

About a week ago someone threw out a stack of art magazines dating from the 1980s. Just think, it took that person over twenty years to discard an unwieldy bunch of dated periodicals. Perhaps that stranger shares two of my more contradictory compulsions -- to hoard, and to dispose of the hordes of the hoarded.

A scavenger by nature, I hauled the mags home and up four flights, despite the fact that they were damp and wrinkled, and had become partly unglued from their night spent in the rain. I spread them out on the floor and, with a scissors, pored over them as destructively as the rain had poured over them. I cut out images of art and bits of erudition, fragments of descriptions and of history. I arranged and rearranged the chosen lines of text until they slid into a sort of surrealist collage poem:

A Sort of Surrealist Collage Poem

Improbable encounters with pointless arrows –
Images (books, boxes, paintings, and pots) –
A row of blue light bulbs, a corridor:
A train track leading into darkness.

Two small houses tucked among the beams,
The circuitous mathematical maneuverings
In her mind.
Side by side with the Apollonian dwelt the Dionysiac,
Joys, sorrows, doubts, and magical sensations:
Intimate pockets of interior
Space.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

One can get cobbled poetry of epiphanic cadence and accidental intrigue simply by reading the Index of First Lines of a great poet like William Butler Yeats. If you have a copy of his Collected Poems, turn to the back (in my edition, Scribner Paperback Poetry, the First Lines begin on p. 533). Now, start reading:

A bloody and a sudden end,
A certain poet in outlandish clothes
A crazy man that found a cup,
A cursing rogue with a merry face,
A doll in the doll-maker's house
A man came slowly from the setting sun,
A man I praise that once in Tara's Halls
A man that had six mortal wounds, a man
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
A most astonishing thing
A pity beyond all telling
A speckled cat and a tame hare
A statesman is an easy man,
A storm-beaten old watch-tower,
A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought
A sudden blow; the great wings beating still
Acquaintance; companion;
Ah, that Time could touch a form
All the heavy days are over;
All the stream that's roaring by
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
Although crowds gathered once if she but showed her face,
Although I can see him still,
Although I'd lie lapped up in linen
Although I shelter from the rain
Although you hide in the ebb and flow
An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man,
An affable Irregular,
An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
An old man cocked his ear upon a bridge;
And thus declared that Arab lady;
Around me the images of thirty years;
As I came over Windy Gap
As the moon sidles up
Autumn is over the long leaves that love us

...and so on, through the alphabetized first lines, to the end:

You ask what I have found and far and wide I go,
You gave, but will not give again
You say, as I have often given tongue
You think it horrible that lust and rage
You waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play,
You who are bent, and bald, and blind,
Your eyes that once were never weary of mine
Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood.

(Kind of makes me swoon.)

Posted by Jane on February 1, 2006 3:45 PM

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