In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 276.
My first attempt at collage was a cutout shape of a Christmas tree with colored balls and garlands pasted onto it. I didn’t understand the essence of juxtaposition, which is to combine unexpected, often incongruous elements to construct something new and surprising.
Juxtaposition creates tension—whether it’s the cheeky humor of Duchamp’s Mustache Mona Lisa (L.H.O.O.Q. ) or the dizzying collision of tones in Bong Joon Ho’s terrifying and hilarious film The Host, with its abrupt shifts of mood and genre. As early filmmakers discovered, we navigate disjunction on screen pretty easily. Our minds make the connections. In Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein avoided “meanwhile back at the ranch” transitions and just cut from scene to scene.
But what is juxtaposition? Etymologically, it means “to place beside.” We can talk about the juxtaposition of image, tone, register, rhythm, sound, color—and we can see it everywhere. To experience its effects, juxtaposition requires our participation. By chance or deliberate choice, the artist has made something that invites us to combine, compare, make associations.
In juxtaposition one element can illuminate the other without the poet explaining why they’re linked, much as Rothko painted red beside blue in one painting, then red beside yellow in another to explore the effect of one color on another and the whole each combination creates.
Juxtaposition in poetry can exhibit varying degrees of disorder or closure. It might be a mild turn or a violent disjunction. A series of juxtaposed images, rhythms, and sounds, can represent a speaker’s interior state—a mind excited, agitated, or simply drifting. Juxtaposition can enact the giddy velocity and simultaneity of the city, the quiet of a snowy road, the breakdown of a civilization. Placing a series of lines or passages one after the other without transition or explanation allows for ambiguity as the reader has to “finish” the process or at least hold the parts together. The meaning is not explicit. Think of the leap in a haiku. Buson doesn’t explain how he gets from the image of a moored boat to the question where did the spring go?
In “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” the shift from description to epiphany happens in one associative leap. And, given that the poem is a sonnet, it’s also a last-minute, very sharp turn. After Rilke suggests what “we cannot know,” and considers the torso “still suffused with brilliance,” after he moves through a series of conditional and hypothetical statements attempting to describe the fragment, he ends with a declaration that seems to come out of nowhere: “You must change your life.” It’s a startling moment, a complete shift in tone. The reader (or speaker) is no longer a passive recipient, but one from whom action is required.
Further along the continuum of this poetic technique are the radical polyvocal juxtapositions and collaged passages that electrified me as a fifteen-year-old first reading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Pieces of Dante and snatches of pub talk merge with allusions to Upanishads, fertility myths, and smutty songs. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Eliot famously writes in the disconnected lines that end the poem.
If you are trying to allow juxtaposition into your practice, you might begin in revision, by deleting transitional or temporal words, like “meanwhile,” “during,” “then.” If you’re the kind of writer who tends to explain, see if you can cut the explanations to create that frisson we experience in the Rilke poem. Take a look at Eliot’s revisions of The Waste Land to see his construction-by-deletion method of working, then try to let your fragments or passages sit side by side without comment, without causal conjunctions like “because.” See what happens if you allow white space to be the transition.
Try to stop yourself from “fixing” or eliminating what feels strange in your original draft. It’s hard to resist the urge to force it to make sense, to create order. Beyond trusting the reader this is about trusting yourself. Every poet has their own aesthetic and tolerance for uncertainty. How much disjunction and fragmentation can you bear, do you find beautiful?
Try this: Go through your notebook, to find the “accidental” juxtapositions. Our minds don’t move in a linear fashion. The challenge here is how to pull together what chance presented and make something out of the pieces by listening to what they suggest. Try to leave what appear to be non sequiturs. Which passages call to others or need the presence of another “color” to become more than themselves?
When it comes to putting together a manuscript, a larger version of this process comes into play: Which poems converse with other poems? Which poems, placed side by side, create surprise, contrast, tension? Which juxtapositions will create the dialectical energies that make a collection more than the sum of its parts? It’s an intuitive, improvisatory process in which your poems are now the “fragments” that will combine to make the larger whole.
For inspiration you might explore the Zuihitsu, a Japanese genre I discovered through the work of poet Kimiko Hahn. A hybrid form, both poetry and prose, the Zuihitsu relies on spontaneity and improvisation so that, as Hahn says, “a sense of disorder might be artfully ordered by fragmenting, juxtaposing, contradicting, varying length or—even within a piece—topic.” It’s an exciting, open form that allows for collision, chance, incongruity, and various strategies of assembling.
Donna Masini’s latest book of poems, Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?, was published by W. W. Norton in May. She lives in New York and is a professor of English at Hunter College.
image credit: Jon Tyson