PoetryXCollage is a printed journal of artwork and writing that operates at the intersection of poetry and collage. We are interested in found poetry, blackout poetry, collage poems, haikus, centos, response collages, response poems, word scrambles, concrete poetry, scatter collage poems, and other poems and artwork that inhabit this world.
Moon & Swan by Rosemary Rae
each 4.5”x 6”; two collages with old photo, fabric, pencil, torn book pages; stitched; 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
It says something that in the Poetry Foundation’s Glossary of Poetic Terms, “collage” is one of the few visual art terms they define. Perhaps this is because so many poets have also been collage artists. In recent years, we’ve seen exhibitions from John Ashbery and Marc Strand, whose collage “dates back to his student days at Yale in the 1950s where he studied with Josef Albers, the renowned Bauhaus artist and color theorist, and also Bernard Chaet.” Arthur Solway recalled, “Though we were eight thousand miles apart we would have weekly Skype calls, and he was always eager and excited to show me the latest batch of collages he was working on.” A 2017 book of Helen Adam’s collages, which fellow poet Robert Duncan referred to as “pleasing weird”, has sold out. Keith Waldrop, Barbara Guest, John Wieners, Norma Cole, the list is long.
Poets have routinely appeared in the pages of the printed magazine. Kolaj 30 featured an Artist Portfolio of Denver, Colorado-based poet and English professor Brian Barker. In Kolaj 27, we remembered poet and mail artist Steve Dalachinsky (1946-2019). In Kolaj 24, Brazilian artist Samuel Eller combined visual poetry and process poetry, contemporary collage, and experimental design. Kolaj 13 has an article about the book Flit, Dennis Milam Bensie’s poetry mashups of classic literature.
Online we wrote about an exhibition featuring the work of Mary Jo Bang, “a celebrated poet who, for most of her life, has secretly made artwork.” Karen Green “transitions seamlessly between textual, visual, and back” in her book, Bough Down, which Ariane Fairlie described as “a cross between poetry and art book.” We also wrote about Cecil Touchon’s Quarantine Collage Poetry, MaryHope Lee’s Nuclear Waste: Poetry and Collage, and countless others.
In “Where The Sun Casts No Shadow: Postcards from the Creative Crossroads of Quito, Ecuador”, an exhibition that debuted at the Wilson Museum of the Southern Vermont Arts Center in November 2019, the poetry of María Clara Sharupi Jua in Spanish, English, and Shuar hung next to art from Quito’s El Club de Collage. (This exhibition will travel to the Knoxville Museum of Art in Fall 2022). At Kolaj LIVE Milwaukee in 2021, we hosted a session by Renée Reizman on her “Deconstructing Legalese” project where she made found poetry using legal documents. During the Cut It Up Salon in Milwaukee, the participants from Reizman’s session read aloud their found legalese poetry. Clark Lunberry, who is known for his large-scale, site-specific art and poetry installations on water, spoke about turning a collection of postcards inherited from his father into “PostCardPoems“. Readings have also been a part of Kolaj Fest New Orleans, particularly at “Why Is That Dinosaur Holding a Vacuum & Other Stories from the World of Collage” in 2018 and “Collage Party at Art Klub” in 2019 and “Show & Tell” in 2022 that was hosted by writer and collagist Kevin Sampsell who read from his book I Made an Accident.
All this is to say that 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.”
PoetryXCollage extends Kolaj Institute’s philosophy that books and publications are natural places for collage, as explored in a 2019 symposium and catalog.
PoetryXCollage soft debuted at Kolaj Fest New Orleans in June 2022 and officially launched July 15, 2022.
NEWS & EVENTS
CALL TO ARTISTS
Poetry & Collage Residency 2024
Early Deadline: Sunday, 7 April 2024
Final Deadline: Sunday, 21 April 2024
In four virtual meetings over the course of the May and through ongoing, online discussion, artists will leave the residency with a deeper understanding of the intersection of collage and poetry. Individual participants will each be invited to create and submit 3-5 page spreads to the PoetryXCollage Journal.
WORKSHOP
PoetryXCollage: An Ekphrastic Collaboration
Sunday, 21 April, 9-10:30AM
As part of the New Orleans Poetry Festival, Christopher Kurts will lead artists and poets through an exercise of call and response that explores the intersection of collage and poetry. Utilizing an expansive supply of collage materials from the Mystic Krewe of Scissors & Glue, the collage collective Kurts runs in New Orleans, workshop attendees will start by making a twenty-minute collage. They will then pass their collages to the next person for them to write a poem inspired by or meant to juxtapose with the collage. Those poems will then be passed on to the next person to make a collage that will in turn be the inspiration for a final poem. (Image: Endless Tune, a collaboration between Kerrie More and Julie Byers. Courtesy of the artists.)
JOURNAL
PoetryXCollage Journal
PoetryXCollage is a printed journal of artwork and writing that operates at the intersection of poetry and collage. We are interested in found poetry, blackout poetry, collage poems, haikus, centos, response collages, response poems, word scrambles, concrete poetry, scatter collage poems, and other poems and artwork that inhabit this world. Each issue presents six movements of work by artists and curators. Page spreads are meant to be free zones of thinking where the contributor has chosen all elements of the layout: font, image place, composition, etc.
Initial volumes are being produced by participants in Kolaj Institute’s Poetry & Collage Residency in March, April, and September 2022 under the direction of Christopher Kurts with support from Ric Kasini Kadour and Christopher Byrne.
PoetryXCollage Volume One features work by Rosemary Rae (El Cajon, California, USA), Cathy Greenhalgh (London, United Kingdom), Jennifer Roche (Chicago, Illinois, USA), doriana diaz (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA), Thomas Mayer (Berlin, Germany), and Cheryl Chudyk (Kirkland, Washington, USA).
PoetryXCollage Volume Two features work by Anthony D. Kelly (Castle Bar, County Mayo, Ireland), Carla Reyes (Astoria, New York, USA), Janice McDonald (Denver, Colorado, USA), Samantha Brown (Blackrock, County Louth, Ireland), Laura Tafe (Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA), and Collaborations by Cathy Greenhalgh, Thomas Mayer, Rosemary Rae, Anthony D. Kelly, & Cheryl Chudyk.
PoetryXCollage Volume Three features work by Adam Farcus (Urbana, Illinois, USA), Carolina Martins (Lisbon, Portugal), Émilie Karuna (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), Jenn Arras (Brooklyn, New York, USA), Julie Byers (Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia), Kerrie More (Kalispell, Montana, USA).
PoetryXCollage Volume Four features work by Jessa Dupuis (Cobble Hill, British Columbia, Canada), John Rigney (Buffalo, New York, USA), Kait O’Brien (Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA), sadé powell (Staten Island, New York, USA), Yoomee Ko (New York, New York, USA), and Collaborations by Kerrie More, Jessa Dupuis, Julie Byers, Carolina Martins, and Kait O’Brien.
PoetryXCollage Volume Five features work by Johnette Downing (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA), Stacy DeBritz (Schenectady, New York, USA), maryhope|whitehead|lee (Phoenix, Arizona, USA), Aimee-Beth Martens (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada), Kelly McGovern (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA), and Gavin W Sewell (New York, New York, USA).
CALL TO ARTISTS
Call for Submissions: PoetryXCollage
Artists and writers interested in submitting should prepare 3-5 page spreads for consideration. Page spreads must conform to exact specifications and include a general artist narrative and a short page spread narrative. Submissions will be reviewed on an ongoing basis
PROJECT HISTORY
MAY 2023
Collage Poet in Residence
at MERZ in Sanquhar, Scotland
Kolaj Institute announces Daniel Lehan as the Collage Poet in Residence at MERZ in Sanquhar, Scotland from 6-30 May-2023. The Collage Poet in Residence is a collaboration between MERZ and Kolaj Institute where an artist travels to Sanquhar to work at the intersection of Poetry and Collage.
Difficult Hope by Kelly McGovern
24″x36″; collage archival inkjet print; 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
SEPTEMBER 2022
Poetry & Collage Residency Round Three
Kolaj Institute is excited to announce the ten artists selected to participate in the third round of the Poetry & Collage Residency. Participants will work together to investigate the intersection of collage and poetry by exploring concepts of found poetry, blackout poetry, collage poems, haikus, centos, response collages, response poems, word scrambles, concrete poetry, scatter collage poems, and other poems and artwork that inhabit this world. Together we will create working definitions and document techniques.
Patrick Blenkarn (Vancouver, BC, Canada) | Johnette Downing (New Orleans, LA, USA) | Stacy DeBritz (Schnectady, NY, USA) | Omayma Khayat (Brooklyn, NY, USA) | Rebecca Faulkner (Brooklyn, NY, USA) | Mary Hope Lee (Phoenix, AZ, USA) | Aimee-Beth Martens (Saskatoon, SK, Canada) | Kelly McGovern (Philadelphia, PA, USA) | Gavin W Sewell (New York, NY, USA) | Susan Lee Simpson (Chapel Hill, NC, USA)
AUGUST 2022
Kolaj LIVE Online: PoetryXCollage Journal Launch
Kolaj Institute was joined by several of the contributing artists—Anthony D Kelly (Castle Bar, Co. Mayo, Ireland), Carla E Reyes (Astoria, NY, USA), Cathy Greenhalgh (London, England, United Kingdom), Cheryl Chudyk (Kirkland, WA, USA), Janice McDonald (Denver, CO, USA), Jennifer Roche (Chicago, IL, USA), Samantha Brown (Blackrock, Co. Louth, Ireland), Thomas Mayer (Berlin, Germany)—in a discussion surrounding the residency, their artwork, and the intersection of collage and poetry. Artists shared images of their work and read their poetry.
ABOUT KOLAJ LIVE ONLINE
Kolaj LIVE Online is a series of virtual programs in the form of forums, panels, workshops, artist talks, studio visits, and other activities that allow people to come together, learn and talk about collage, and connect in real time to the collage community. Our goal is to bring the community together in a spirit of mutual support and fellowship.
I Set Your Home on Fire (from the series Nine Weeks) by Émilie Karuna
6″x6″; solid color paper, washi paper, ink; 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
APRIL 2022
Poetry & Collage Residency Round Two
Kolaj Institute is excited to announce the twelve artists selected to participate in the second round of the Poetry & Collage Residency. It says something that in the Poetry Foundation’s Glossary of Poetic Terms, “collage” is one of the few visual art terms they define. Perhaps this is because so many poets have also been collage artists. In recent years, we’ve seen exhibitions from John Ashbery and Marc Strand, whose collage “dates back to his student days at Yale in the 1950s where he studied with Josef Albers, the renowned Bauhaus artist and color theorist, and also Bernard Chaet.” Arthur Solway recalled, “Though we were eight thousand miles apart we would have weekly Skype calls, and he was always eager and excited to show me the latest batch of collages he was working on.” A 2017 book of Helen Adam’s collages, which fellow poet Robert Duncan referred to as “pleasing weird”, has sold out. Keith Waldrop, Barbara Guest, John Wieners, Norma Cole, the list is long.
Adam Farcus (Urbana, IL, USA) | Carolina Martins (Lisbon, Portugal) | Émilie Karuna (Montreal, QC, Canada) | Jenn Arras (Brooklyn, NY, USA) | Jessa Dupuis (Cobble Hill, BC, Canada) | John Rigney (Buffalo, NY, USA) | Julie Byers (Coffs Harbour, NSW, Australia) | Kaitlyn O’Brien (Albuquerque, NM, USA) | Kerrie More (Kalispell, MT, USA) | sadé powell (Staten Island, NY, USA) | Yoomee Ko (New York, NY, USA) | Zoe Lambrinakos-Raymond (Montreal, QC, Canada)
MARCH 2022
Poetry & Collage Residency Round One
Kolaj Institute is pleased to announce the twelve artists selected to participate in the first round of the Poetry & Collage Residency. In several virtual meetings over four weeks and through ongoing, online discussion, artists will leave the residency with a deeper understanding of the intersection of collage and poetry. Individual participants will each create multiple page spreads that will be included in a forthcoming book of collage and poetry from Kolaj Institute.
Anthony D Kelly (Castle Bar, Co. Mayo, Ireland) | Carla E Reyes (Astoria, NY, USA) | Cathy Greenhalgh (London, England, United Kingdom) | Cheryl Chudyk (Kirkland, WA, USA) | doriana diaz (Philadelphia, PA, USA) | Jake Weigel (Murphys, CA, USA) | Janice McDonald (Denver, CO, USA) | Jennifer Roche (Chicago, IL, USA) | Laura Tafe (Lebanon, NH, USA) | Rosemary Rae (El Cajon, CA, USA) | Samantha Brown (Blackrock, Co. Louth, Ireland) | Thomas Mayer (Berlin, Germany)