Eliot Unbound

As both a literature and art enthusiast, I heartily enjoy mixing the two disciples together and drawing connections. This mixed-media assemblage triptych, “Eliot Unbound” aims to translate T.S. Eliot’s unconventional approaches to writing poetry into a paradigm for creating visual art. In T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land,” he references unrelated historic and cultural anecdotes preceding World War I, assembling each reference into a disjointed but unified poem. The poem is very difficult to read due to its fragmented and incoherent nature. It is most widely interpreted as a reaction to how war breaks apart society and culture. Thus, the experience of reading the poem is like sifting through a diasporic dump, attempting to put things back together the way they used to be, but never entirely making sense of it. Eliot’s approach to writing this poem can be summarized in Eliot’s line: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

For this assemblage, I ripped, crumpled, coffee-stained, and tattered fragments of Eliot’s poem, creating waste out of “The Waste Land.” Then following Eliot’s approach to poetic composition, I “shored” together the fragments of his poem into a cohesive whole by crocheting it together in three different ways with yarn. Crocheting is congruous with poetic composition, for the crafter composes, lines, spaces, loops, and breaks in stitches the same way poets structure their poems with words. To further reference the historic context of Eliot’s work, I sewed the poems onto the canvases using surgical thread found in my attic from World War I. Staining the pages with coffee is a subtle tribute to T.S. Eliot’s line “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons” from “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock." Displayed vertically, the resulting triptych flows together with a sense of chaotic unity by aligning the dissimilar elements in each block with the next. Through these pieces, I hope to elucidate the connections between poetic art and visual art by applying the methods and contexts of T.S. Eliot’s poetry to assemblage.