My Fans

I started making collages because other poets were and they weren’t that good at it, really. On the other hand, artist friends like Joe Brainard and George Schneeman were very good at it. But the skills and materials seemed available to anyone, and the form, with the addition of a few cut-out words, felt almost like that of a poem. That’s the tricky part, and I can’t precisely describe it: the collage comes out of your hands, and in a similar way when I’m writing a poem that’s only words, I make shapes, use colors, and encrust with bright stuff. The feeling of using the hands and the feeling of saying things transfer back and forth between the two forms.

At first collage was something I did with leftover energy, or it was a present for someone’s birthday, or I was thinking about what it was like to be a visual artist. Then for one eight- or nine-month period in 1974–75 I only made collages. I could hardly bother to write poems; I worked on my collages, taped them to the walls, and had them around me every day. There were words on them, too, and at some point I typed up all their texts as a manuscript called “The X-Rayed Rose,” still unpublished. I had become exhausted and wanted to think with a part of myself I didn’t know so well and that wasn’t so tired. I had recently written a long poem called “Songs for the Unborn Second Baby,” born a second baby, and moved with my family from England back to Chicago.

I’m leading up to the fans, which began a few years later in New York. I was used to thinking instinctively when I made collages, and after a while I followed certain procedures and had expectations involving quality, materials, length of time the collage might take, what kind of “place” or “knowledge” I might arrive at inside myself when the work was done. I was also in the habit of collecting things. I favored thin cheap paper like that of the magazines in Sunday newspapers (I liked the way it took glue), images of flowers and gemstones, discards of every description found on the sidewalk if not too dirty to pick up, poster paints and inks and cheap watercolors—I almost always painted and drew on the collage, added pieces of lace, stickers, etc. One day I had a fan—a plain paper fan, pink—and I realized I could make it be permanently open and paste things on it. I affixed strips of cardboard to the back so it wouldn’t fold, and then I made this bizarre pasted-upon object that was also beautiful. I neglected to put words on it—I was afraid of spoiling it—but most of my subsequent fans have words on them. This first fan was achieved in the late seventies and I’ve been making collage fans ever since, though I also still make a lot of rectangular collages, using the cardboard that arrives with packages people send me; booklets composed, say, of a few pieces of printing paper folded, with images and words; watercolors, drawings, boxes, miscellaneous objects. I still like gold and silver ink, faux jewels, almost any stickers, baseball cards, Star Wars cards, miniature playing cards.

A fan, both a semicircular one and a round one, requires a special approach to composition. A semicircular fan, though, has the mechanical characteristic of opening and closing (theoretically—mine are always open), it curves, it has spokes. There is a European tradition involving the fan as beautiful object, and in Asia there exists a true fine-arts sense of what you can do with a fan shape. Generally speaking, it’s a question of roundness and where images can go that makes working with fans different from working with rectangles; with the semicircular shape it’s like constellations rising over the earth, something like that. When I make a fan I am usually thinking through something, like a life event or the form of a long poem I’m working on that I don’t want to address all that directly. I start slowly, I add things slowly, or in bursts with long intervals in between. A fan can take me several years to finish, and will become very layered and changing.

Generally, I like the way my collages change over the years after completion. They get better and more powerful and articulate without my doing anything further to them. Time does it, and I’m still wondering how this happens. I don’t know if something organic is involved beyond the materials themselves aging and something to do with the glue tightening, but mine seem to change more than the collages made by friends who are artists. My collages are fragile entities, the fans especially, and when they start to fall apart or fade I send them to the Alice Notley archive at the University of California San Diego Special Collections Library. It’s almost like keeping them, because they’re together and I know where they are. I hate to sell them to strangers and have them disappear, though I do like to give or sell them to my friends and be able to visit them. I need them.

I think my collages resemble my poems, though they’re not vocal. They reflect my conception of language being as infinitely dimensioned as a person or the physical world of objects, of being always intertwined with matter. They stick out, they’re hard to frame, they can’t be used for a “purpose” ... they’re encrusted, multi-layered, and follow their own logic, each. Because I never know what’s going to happen. I open a fan, make sure it will stay open, and paste something on. I’ve begun again.