SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

define his identity and function in a chaotic time.” 25 Finding himself unable to do it alone,
Radnoti is pasted in to converse with the speaker and to interrogate his reactions, urging him to
avoid rashness and to recognize the inevitability of just walking on. The two texts, like two
people walking are parallel and unreconciled, as it is unclear after the collocation if the speaker
will adopt Radnoti’s vision.
* * * *
Vers Collage is a form poetical expression that breathes new life into literary allusions through
the application of Dadaist and Surrealist techniques of non-linear, multivocal composition.
The poets who compose vers collage use traditional stylistic means of intertextuality—allusion
and quotation — and recompose them to reflect contemporary cultural beliefs and practices.
Each author is burdened by a remembrance of the past and out of an anxiety to “get it right”
this time or to solve a problem, they create opportunities through the collage elements to
simultaneously “[fragment] and juxtapose” a conversation about “cultural values.” 26 Just as
collage in art attracts and destabilizes the viewers’ expectations, vers collage prompts the reader
to come, to see and to go on their way. What happens next, how far we will go as a “wounded
and bleeding great wolf”—if we do anything at all- remains for each reader, for each of us, to
decide.
NOTES
1. Robert Rigney, “Dadaist Details,” ARTNews October 2002:68. The purpose of the
lebenscollage is to let viewers see what Hannah Hoch “was really like” according to the
article.
2. Cullingford, “Reading Yeats in Popular Culture,” in Ireland’s Others. Gender and
Ethnicity in Irish Literature and Popular Culture (Cork: Cork UP, 2001): 193-212.
3. Frederick Feirstein discusses the tension/ release of tension factor in Turner’s dramatic
lyrics in “Expansive Poetry: After the Revisionists” Pivot 54 (Summer 2002): 18.
4. Jules David Prown, Art as Evidence. Writings on Art and Material Culture. (New Haven:
Yale UP, 2001): 73.
5. Peter Gay in Art and Act: On Causes in History- Manet, Gropius, and Mondrian (New
York: Harper and Row, 1976) describes historical causation as composed of craft
(tradition); culture (present day influences and beliefs) and privacy (what happens in the
mind of the creator). James Fernandez in “The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive
Culture” Cultural Anthropology 15:2 (June 1974): pp. 119-145 distinguishes between
structural metaphors that illuminate the physical world and textual metaphors or words
designed to capture the emotional states of daily existence.
6. Prown: 71 and 79-83.
7. Stephen Pfohl, Death at the Parasite Café Social Science (Fictions) and the Postmodern
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992): 97. My thanks to Dr. Judith Halden-Sullivan for
making me aware of Pfohl’s book.
8. Pfohl, p. 100.
9. Pfohl, pp. 102-103.
10. Turner Cassity, Waiting to Go Under. (Edgewood, KY: R.L. Barth, 1998) and W.B. Yeats,
Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1959).
11. This is elaborated on by Derek Attridge in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (New York:
Routledge, 1992): 15-17.
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