Don’t hold me to the title here.  I have no idea if there is any such thing.  But there is collage in writing (which I didn’t know until the class I took on line – the best example if you don’t know it is David Shields’ “Reality Hunger” – it’s a whole genre I never before knew of, considered “innovative writing” but it’s been around too long, I think, to be terribly innovative.  I think of it more as on the edge and unknown.  I guess you have to go to a good college teaching MFA, non-traditional, to be exposed to it.  So much out there in the world that I may never know.  It’s all luck of stumbling across.) and there is such a thing as a “prose” poem – it’s also a genre, though I’ll admit I haven’t quite gotten my head around what it actually might be, and from what I’m reading I think it’s in the eye of the reader and the intention of the writer.

Anyways, I’m embarking on 8 week of Maps of the Imagination and 14 weeks of more on the Difficult Imagination, which introduced me to collage (Writer’s Village University, on-line – so affordable it makes me cry with joy), along with a goal to keep going to 100 poems building on NaPoWriMo2018.  I anticipate much overlap and borrowing from one to use in the other or I will never get through all this.  In that vein, I offer the following collage prose poem which is taken from my first assignment for Maps of the Imagination and also from my poem The Book of Secrets, day 12 of this run – great example of how all of this starts to flow together once you get in the rhythm.  I have to say I am delighted to finally be  blogging and writing again – it’s been a long while since I managed.  It fits the nonpattern that is my life right now – jazz – discordant that it is.

SECRETS

I have wasted my life, I have wasted it gladly, remorsefully, willingly, and in the full knowledge there were many things that would not have been different, or would have been better off, had they been left unsaid. Don’t you ever want to have just one thing that no one else knows about, so no one can ruin it for you? But, nothing stays secret forever.
**
We think we hide things so well, and yet everyone around us knows the secret we refuse to tell to ourselves, the thing that, like Jung’s “Shadow,” we stash in the darkness of our subconscious because our awake self can’t accept it as part of who we are – and if it does come up, we cast it onto those around us with pointed finger and righteousness.
**
Talk to me of shame, I said, and the being with bright feathers said to me: No one is worthy because no one is perfect. And it said: shame is destructive, it disconnects, makes you dangerous. And I hung my head so that it could not see my eyes and know that It had spoken truth. I snuggled down into the dark.

NOTES: first paragraph in order, quotes Mary Ruefle, Lula Sales, Jennifer Hubbard. The last paragraph contains language used by Brene Brown on guilt vs. shame.