Tracing Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Engagement With Collage

At Hyperallergic, Andrew Mossin writes about Rachel Blau DuPlessis's visual art collages and how they informed shifts in her poetic practice. Mossin notes that DuPlessis first "began making actual visual collages and then series of works with poetry and collage together," and later took to "re-envisioning projects that would become . . . interstitial" while "moving toward the opening up of another realm of work, one with roots in collage." More:

“Entering the actual visual spaces of collage,” DuPlessis told me, became a critical step in “instantiating my collage poetics by making visual text as well as poetic structures.” When I asked her in a recent email exchange to talk about this transition, in which collage became a constitutive form of thinking and writing, she stated:

I was trying to attend to a mode of visual art to which I had always been deeply attracted, despite having no particular visual or technical training. I had taken a step into two collage poems in Drafts made in color (with text), and only published in full in a separate book (a bit rare but in print) called The Collage Poems of Drafts (2011). […] I was ready for a large serial project mingling writing and collage. I think of the process as “making pages,” a rubric whose meanings and scope I am just beginning to understand.

The connection between collage and text started to shape around the political climate of the early 2000s, a period that DuPlessis described to me as “darkening and getting weirder in ways I had few insights to state in analytic terms. The economic crises, the blockages, and mean-nesses — I just began working intuitively with these political feelings and odd ‘normal’ images in fairly ugly, angry, baffled, and off-putting ways.”

Continue reading at Hyperallergic.