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[Luis continues]... between poets and artists providing that there is a language in common that could be adapted as a sort of ''collage'' between the collaborators. I believe that Derek and I have just done exactly that.

P.S. I like your decoration, Joyelle—a sort of grand collage also. "Parade'' (and all Satie) has always influenced me, and also Blaise Cendrars's poetry of his cubist epoch. Your choice is a good example of collaborative work without falling into any kind of canon.

McSweeney: I would like to know more about this collage language that exits between collaborators. Can you two describe your collaborative process? Is a new collage invented for each new project, or do collaborators develop a distinctive medium for use across projects?

White: I'm not sure I would call the collaborations that Carlos and I have done collages, though we both have done collage collaborations—I think Carlos probably more than me. When I think of collage I think of gluing and combining unrelated elements, usually on the same page. Our collaborations have been less interactive and more associative or interpretative, keeping the visual and textual elements separated—though it appears that "collaboration" and "collage" share a same root, so maybe as a whole you could treat an entire book as a "collage." I have treated Carlos's works as sort of Rorschach blots or chance-operations (à la Cage) that induce thoughts or memories to facilitate stories—that's how it has worked in the past anyway. Which is not to say that's how it would work were we to collaborate again, or with other collaborations we both have done or will do. I think each time it is a different process and necessarily should be.

Luis: Actually, our process of collaboration had to do more, I believe, with what a poet friend of mine, José Lezama Lima, used to call el súbito, or something that occurs suddenly and illuminates at the same time. Derek saw my drawings first and next my collages and suddenly (I think) was illuminated in a creative way: he began, then, to write around my images his poetical prose. Once it was done, the collage or maybe the bricolage between both emerged as one work. Collage is for me the substance of mostly everything I create. But we must distinguish between the collage dear to the Surrealists (as invented first by Max Ernst) as the creation of a new scenario by pasting together distant realities (that was Lautréamont's first definition and next Pierre Reverdy's idea of the poetical image) and the second kind of collage—the papier collé used by the Cubists and many Dadaists, i.e. Schwitters's Merz, etc. Those were used by me in my collaboration with Derek.

White: Question back at you: in your new online quarterly, Action, Yes, you call poems by Aase Berg translated by Johannes Göransson and with images by Tom Benson "collages"— did you make that distinction and marriage of elements, and would you as an editor, consider yourself a "collage artist"? And in general, even if editors do not contribute content to a literary or arts magazine, should they be considered collage artists by virtue of the art and writing they choose to combine and the order in which they combine and present it?

McSweeney: Regarding the Berg collages in Action, Yes: the term is used to refer most immediately to Benson's collages—he created them, I believe, in response to Berg's poems. To my mind, the visual collages are both a reading and rewriting of Aase's work. The same may be said of Johannes's translations, of course, and all three texts together function as a collage, too (through the medium of our website, designed by John Dermot Woods—collaboration on top of collaboration!). I do think that the editorial function is one of collage, because hopefully the finished journal also has the same tension of unity/disunity found in most visual collage. We would not want things to feel too 'of a piece,' but the design prevents us from reading the contents of the site as entirely random.... Also, as you can tell from my switch to the first person plural in the last sentence, editorial process for us is also a collage—John, Johannes, and I collaborate to solicit the material, though John Woods's interface is a rewriting of the journal's contents in a way far different from (and superior to) what Johannes and I could or would have envisioned for the whole (because we don't have his web-design skills or vision).

Maybe the task of building Action, Yes is like building Schwitters's Merzbau!

I'd like to turn Derek's questioning about editorial work as collage back to you two. Derek, it seems like the variety of editorial/publishing work you do also amounts to a kind of collage. Is that how you experience it? How do you reconcile your publishing and writing selves, or is there any need to for such a reconciliation? How do the variety of media you work in affect your sense of working in collage?

And Carlos: Does the act of exhibiting your work amount to a kind of collage? It seems to me that an exhibit space allows work to be viewed in a deterministic, usually serial construct that amounts to an interpretation of the individual pieces.... Is a work changed when it is exhibited? Is a piece changed when it is published, as in the Calamari books, or in a gallery program?

Luis: No, I don't think that my works, when exhibited, amount to a collage. It is true that once placed on a wall, in a certain sequence, the "reading" of them could be construed as one collage made of different works. Especially if one works (like I do) in series. What changes is the nature of the work once the work becomes part of the market and its speculations. Today the price of the works of art that are considered

[continues...]


Walls for Finnegans, Carlos M. Luis