CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Lindsey Warren
Rappahannock Review Poetry Editors: We adore the creativity and color in your piece! From the glitter to the painted background, what inspires your design elements and layout?
Lindsey Warren: You are kind to say that! I got into collage a few years ago after learning about the exciting stuff going on in the medium (I highly recommend the book Collage by Women: 50 Essential Contemporary Artists as a resource for such things). Making each poem collage is like divining a small universe. Postcards are a good size for two things: easy transference (by design), and the challenge of keeping poems distilled while maintaining rigorous craft. The formless exuberance of the paint on the back of the postcard attempts the chaos of space. The text floats in those colors, and the smaller ornaments may or may not be in direct conversation with a word or line. The three components (the paint, the text, and the ornaments) must all have their own narrative but also must be aware of the others.
RR: Your language is so lovely; we were obsessed with “greengold” and “emeraldscatter” in this piece. How do you craft your combinations of words?
LW: Thank you, that means a lot. I enjoy testing the membranes of English words, and I often like looking at them as one might look at genetic material—it’s all about sequence. This particular poem collage was a love-note to my partner, and I wanted to make a color language unique to his beauty. “Greengold” came from his personal mixture of earth-coolness and sun-warmth, and “sleepless emeraldscatter” was my attempt to describe the dynamic green accents of his eyes. His irises, like his thoughts, are always moving.
RR: Since there is such limited space to work with, how do you approach packing so much into a very short poem?
LW: A short poem is constantly asking its writer, “Is this important?” Only what is necessary, and that differs from poem to poem. What I try to keep constant, however, is some sort of surprise, whether it is in making a chimerical word (like “emeraldscatter”), or in an image, or in syntax. In short poems, I have to be more trusting of surprise, and more trusting of the reader with surprise.
RR: What is your process when creating collages like these? Is there a specific image or color you are drawn to first?
LW: I always start with the poem. A poem can be without collage; a collage cannot be without a poem (for me). I will usually begin with either a color palette for the postcard paints, or a color palette of the paper used for text, or a particular ornament, and build around it. I always want each thing to have its own character, but to also have those characters work well with the others.
RR: Are your collage poems part of another project that you’re working on?
LW: This particular poem collage is from a chapbook manuscript entitled Emeraldscatter, and it is obvious that this poem collage gave the manuscript its name. I also have poem collages in honor of Aphrodite, a manuscript of poem collages entitled Falling Garden about the artwork of the same name by Steiner and Lenzlinger, and an on-going city-wide poem collage project entitled Wilmington is a Poem (I have been chronicling it in my Substack of the same title). I do love these things.
Read “Greengold Lover” by Lindsey Warren in Issue 12.1