“shorter american memory: Rosmarie Waldrop’s Poetics of the Collage”

This essay assesses Rosmarie Waldrop’s trans-textual poetics of the collage. Directly borrowed from the visual arts, the method provides the poet with an invaluable instrument of discovery and criticism that, releasing signs from the tyranny of reference and mimetic representation, sets minds free from convention, questions the construction of historical discourse, recovers and emancipates voices that are otherwise doomed to erasure or oblivion.