Thinking About Assemblage

Joseph Cornell
Robert Rauschenberg
This is called "Assemblage #1" and it's by Bruce Gray. Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Cornell: I've loved their work since I was a teenager. I went to a Cornell retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art when I was 18. I brought a friend from college to share with her some of my favorite boxes (I loved the ones with birds the best). She had trouble getting what the point was, but my sister, the art student, had luckily clued me in, so I didn't have to ask questions like "but is this art?"

Sometimes I love nothing more than assembling random objects in my poems. I hadn't made this connection before--I mean, I knew I sometimes liked to make poems where I worked hard to not have images "match" or feed off each other--but I hadn't made the connection between my love of Cornell and Rauschenberg, and the kind of poems I write.