Not many people know that I’ve always loved poetry. It’s just not something that comes up in everyday conversation. (Although perhaps it should!) I’ve recently been exploring how words might possibly mingle with my collage-making… so I participated, along with 11 other artists and poets, in the Kolaj Institute’s inaugural Poetry and Collage Residency (March 2022).
Several selections from work I created during the residency are included in a newly launched journal, PoetryXCollage.
Pictured is “Island,” which combines imagery, the line-ending words of an existing poem, and a few added found words (9x8”collage on 14x11” watercolor paper, 2022).
The Kolaj Institute wrote of the residency and resulting journal…
“Kolaj has been circling around the intersection of poetry and collage throughout its history and yet it wasn’t really until Rod T. Boyer’s article in Kolaj 32, “Mind the Gap: Collision and Context in Haiku and Collage, that we began to appreciate the degree to which these two mediums interacted with each other. In that article Boyer compares the disjunction that occurs in haiku with a similar phenomenon in collage. A light went off and we decided to organize a series of residencies with the goal of exploring the intersection of collage and poetry.
In January 2022, we issued a call to artists for a Poetry & Collage Residency and received so many excellent responses that we organized a series of three residencies. The artists heard from guest speakers Kevin Sampsell, Renée Reizman, Rod T. Boyer, and the Poetry Foundation’s Fred Sasaki and were challenged to create page spreads to be included in a forthcoming book of collage and poetry.
In the residency, we challenged artists to move beyond taxonomical debates. Ric Kasini Kadour said, “What is a poem? We do not need to have a singular answer to that question. Individually we must each answer that question for ourselves. In practice, every poem we make will be an example of what a poem is. In considering other people’s work, we should ask ourselves, How is this a poem?”
During the residencies, artists interrogated each other’s artwork, collaborated, and shared ideas. And at the end of it, they sent us more page spreads than could fit into a single book. Impressed and moved by the volume and quality of cultural output and a deep belief that this practice–however you want to describe it–at the intersection of collage and poetry deserves a platform, we decided to create a new journal dedicated to it. Christopher Kurts named it PoetryXCollage and said, “How do you pronounce it? You can say the letter ‘X’ or it can stand for the words ‘and,’ ‘in collaboration with,’ or ‘featuring.’ The X is an intersection, a crossroads, or an equation. X marks the spot.”
Each issue of PoetryXCollage is a printed journal of artwork and writing and presents six movements of work by artists and curators. Page spreads are free zones of thinking where the contributor has chosen all elements of the layout: font, image place, composition, etc.
Published by Kolaj and Kasini House, PoetryXCollage Volume Two includes my work along with that of half of the artists in the residency: Anthony D. Kelly, Castle Bar, County Mayo, Ireland; Carla E. Reyes, Astoria, New York, USA; Samantha Brown, Blackrock, County Louth, Ireland; and Laura Tafe, Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA. The publication is available for purchase here. In 2023, Kolaj Institute will open submissions for future volumes of PoetryXCollage.