Donald Trump’s speech on immigration from August input into Paul Chan’s “oH Ho.”

Read Part I, Part II, Part III. 

By Rick Moody

October 3, 2016

One of my jobs is teaching writing classes for visual artists. I do this at two schools—at the Yale University School of Art, and at the NYU graduate program in fine art. This is a job I dearly love, in part because I love visual artists (I am married to one), love their minds and their conceptual brilliance, but also because I love making writing accessible to people who aren’t always sure that it is for them. My theory is that creativity the same across disciplines, and if you can take a great photograph, or make a multi-media extravaganza, you can definitely write well too. People think the writing always has to be perfect, literary, or, in the case of visual artists, that it has to sound like Artforum or October. Not at all! It should sound like human beings!

What this has to do with the election is that I always give an assignment that involves making found text, or collage-oriented poems (something I do myself on occasion) at the beginning of the semester in order to give the non-writers a chance to demystify language, and so that they might realize that it’s okay to treat the words like objects (I’m quoting the great poet Susan Wheeler here).

In both classes this semester, I gave the artists Donald Trump’s speech on immigration from a couple of months ago and then a copy of the National Enquirer—the last publication supporting him, it would seem—after which they were encouraged to make four lines of poetry combining words or lines from the two sources. We then voted on our favorites lines and made “sonnets” out of the resulting collages.

Here’s the Yale class (who consisted of: Joe Hoyt, Res, Danna Singer, Chau Tran, Anna Shimshak, Ashton Hudgins, Farah Al-Qasimi, Bek Andersen, Lance Brewer, Matt Leifheit, Carr Chadwick, Kathryn Kerr, Harry Griffin):

Word Salad #1

Most people thought the era of the super-powerful diet pill ended
because of safety concerns,
and they would comply if we would act properly
The juiciest body doesn’t serve you—let me tell you who it does serve.
Don’t forget the Supreme Court of the United States,
don’t forget that, and don’t forget building up our depleted military,
and don’t forget dad’s high school ring.
Someone from your past who you never expected to hear from
reaches out to send her daughter one final message—
weak, weak, weak…
I would hide them all in my lace-up shoes,
and before I would go...