This collage is called “Sad Girl Wanting to Hold Her Heart.” This now a couple years old. The text is from a book I found in a free bin at the library. I made it right after Aaron left for Seattle.
Sometimes I feel poetry is so strong it is almost maddening. The impulse then becomes cutting out pictures and creating an image with a different look at narrative. I have 3 collages in the works right now and hope for there to be more. I am finding this another way to express things, things there sometimes seems to be no words for, or not complete words, or words that haven’t come to me yet.
The collaboration poems would be an exception to this, writing with Aaron being yet another expression, something gathered into my heart like a rose behind the ear. This is something I look forward to, letting words float in my mind, waiting for him, not writing down the words I anticipate to be in our poems.
One of my hundreds of favorite Dickinson poems (#1732) goes thus:
My life closed twice before its close — / It yet remains to see / If immortality unveil / A third event to me // So huge, so hopeless to conceive / as these that twice befell. / Parting is all we know of heaven, / And all we need of hell.
After reflecting further on Confessional Poets, after teaching this movement of American literary history, I came to the fascinating conclusion that Dickinson (or at least to me …) is the first confessional poet. I plan on revisiting her letters with Thomas Higginson. Good preparation for the collaboration.
