A collage is a mixture of various pictures, objects, or words put together to express either some type of emotion, idea, or tell a story. I chose to read Sonnet XV by Ted Berrigan and not only do you get a poem but a collage as well. This poem has easily become my favorite I've read thus far in class and will be for a long time. The way this poem is set up was mind blowing to me. I had always heard about poets talking about "breaking the rules of writing" and having your own style, but this took the cake for me.
After reading this sonnet for the first time I did not have the same feelings toward it that I do now. I was very confused and didn't see what was so great about it at all. I didn't understand the pop culture references, the sentences did not flow, the ideas were jumping around and I couldn't get a grasp of the poem as a whole. I assumed it must of been special in some way or I would not be reading it in my class right now, but I thought it was just out of my time and I had nothing to gain from it... And thankfully I was incredibly wrong.
After another student mentioned that if you read the sonnet in a certain way it would make much more sense, I had to see for myself. I began matching up certain lines with their counterparts or continuations and it started making some sense and I felt as if I was solving a puzzle. I thought it was just for about four lines of the poem but then soon after I realized that the entire poem was setup in a certain order to where the first line would match up with the last line and second with second from last and so on. I truly got excited because I had never seen something like this in poetry before. Once I had read the entire poem the "correct way" everything had made sense! (except for the pop culture references haha) This was the first time I had ever seen a poet really step out of the box and I was happy we got to read this in class.
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