Author as Collector

After presenting the chapter "Box Logic" to our class, it got me thinking of the idea of author as collector. If composing is indeed a collection of ideas, who is to say how these ideas can or "should" be organized. (That reminds me, I have a very self-reflective friend, forever questing to improve himself, who is attempting to eliminate the word "should" from his personal vocabulary. The power of language, indeed!) But, back to organizing ideas. Poets have had a handle on this much longer. Why can't ideas be organized in ways that do not always make sense to a linear perspective? The writer does not even have to have total control of how the ideas are organized. The reader can also have an active role. All of this intrigues me as a writer and as a teacher of writing.

As an aspiring novelist, I know eventually I would like to experiment with alternate ways in which to organize a story. In class, I brought up Mary Robison's novel "Why Did I Ever" as an example. In it Robison reflects her main character "Money's" ADD by embracing the result of her own battle with writer's block. To combat it, Robison set about writing a series of ideas and character sketches on notecards which instead of turning into a "traditional" novel, she collected them, put them in an order that made "sense" to the story, and thus the novel was born. At first glance, one might think that this was taking the easy way out of creating a conventional novel plot structure, but as one critic notes, "Don't be fooled by the short sequences and the fast pace of Mary Robison's wry and tragic novel into thinking that this is a 'light' or an 'easy' book. Quite the contrary; each section, however brief, is finely crafted and perfectly in tune. The pathos that runs through the story -- and we get it in increasing doses as the novel unfolds -- is as heartbreaking as the humor is laugh out loud funny." To read excerpts or find this novel, see this link.
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Did-Ever-Mary-Robison/dp/1582432554/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1303572335&sr=1-1

Geoffrey Sirc's ideas intrigue me and inspire me to think of ways in which I can reach the creative and compositional sensibilities of my students by allowing them to be archivists and curators as well as architects of their ideas. As Sirc states: "So composition as craving: teaching students to feel desire and lack . . .I want students, for example, to be as obsessed about rap, as interested in creating their boxed homages to it as Cornell was about Fanny Cerrito. It's important, I think, to have students work with lived texts of desire . . . in order to develop a passional aesthetic like Cornell's and Benjamin's" (117).

In other words, I wish for my students as writers what I wish for myself. To not let form or structure hinder the voice and passion of their writing -- no matter what kind of writing it is. And to allow themselves to "collect" and "find" ideas that inspire them. As a teacher, and most intriguingly, as a writer, I hope to incorporate the objet trouve -- or "found object" into my writing assignments and my writing -- which as an idea is not new. Sirc quotes Apollonaire in 1912: "Prospectus, catalogues, posters, advertisements of all sorts which contain the poetry of our age: The collage technique, that art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, is the most important innovation in the art of this century . . ." (118). As the aforementioned media was also new to that century, one cannot help but imagine what kinds of creations we as writers today can create using not only those types of media created 100 years ago that are still important today, but incorporating them with the new media of today. The possibilities are endless.