Content area
Full text
This collage seeks to demonstrate the ways in which composition students can benefit from practice in collage-based writing.
Compositionists continue to push past worn academic forms, such as the personal narrative and the academic essay, toward forms of writing that challenge students enough to disturb their sense of acceptable academic prose. Collage, we should remind ourselves, is one worthy contender in this mix.
In a collage entitled "Time and Distance Overcome," Eula Biss offers a brief history of the telephone pole in the United States. A mundane object, the telephone pole has a beleaguered history, according to Biss. Many US citizens did not want one in their yards. Private property rights pitted against shared utility. Biss raises her discussion to a more provocative level when she juxtaposes this perdurable march of telephone poles as instruments of human connectivity with serial imagery of lynchings from these same poles, beginning with a lynching in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, in 1898 (6). The telephone pole, because of its ubiquitous presence, its shape and size, was used in lynchings across the United States. Telephone pole lynchings populate the collage.
At the end of her collage, Biss writes,
When I was young, I believed that the arc and swoop of telephone wires along the roadways was beautiful. I believed that the telephone poles, with their transformers catching the evening sun, were glorious. I believed my father when he said, "My dad could raise a pole by himself." And I believed that the telephone itself was a miracle. Now, I tell my sister, these poles, these wires, do not look the same to me. Nothing is innocent, my sister reminds me. But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant. (11)
The collage-style of the writing, laying side-by-side images at odds with one another, increases this feeling of shame.
A collage, according to David Shields, is a piece of writing "in which tiny paragraph units work together to project a linear motion" (176). Shields continues:
Its thematic investigation is manifest from the beginning. As with action painting, new music, self-reflexive documentary film, and Language poetry, collage teaches the reader to understand that the movements of the writer's mind are intricately entangled with the work's meaning. Forget "intricately entangled with the work's...