fragmentation

I said a while ago that I had been thinking about fragmentation ala Picasso and indeed the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo who carred a picture of the Guernica with him as inspiration. The fact that a Nigerian poet could be so inspired by someone from a completely different race and culture high lights the multi national face of Modernism.Modernism pushed these boundaries so that they eventually blurred. Just in passing, traditional African poetry by the likes of Okigbo speaks a public language,even though they reference national cults and religion that can be obscure.But the initiates were the public for such poetry.
I am now reading Alan Ginsberg and O'Hara's American poetry - and this is public poetry in fragmented form. The poem "Howl" is meant to literally be howled out,  as a customer in my shop who knew Alan Ginsberg personally told me. How exciting to touch history through her  - it is these connections that add vital links in life.O'Hara talks about his everyday life in New York, non poetic subjects such as picking up a hamburger on the day that Billie Holiday died. But the atmosphere he creates through his own personal day to day collage is unique.I still struggle, being a traditiional "high" poetry reader to deal with the everyday non poetic subjcet matter and align myself with the New Critics of that time.
Collage comes from the French "collier"  - to glue and to this end I have been thinking about creating a collage of my own snipets of wordage and blending them together into a whole. This is what I will be working on next.
A comment for today
"Word of mouth and information passed
somehow no questions asked
today's egotism, manners forgotten
something in Denmark is still rotten!"