The scrapbook kept by the American imagist poet Hilda Doolittle—known as HD—embodies a kind of willful incongruity, with pages that are at turns symbolic and surreal. There are nudes; a snake; photographs of buildings and ruins; a roulette wheel. Many pages include collaged items—often photos of H.D. herself cut out and superimposed onto landscapes or friezes—and there is at least one page of silhouetted images intermingled with Greek statuary. H.D.’s life and career were likely more mercurial than the pages in this scrapbook would attest, but there remains something fascinating about the experimental nature of these pages. Shifting scale, flexible space, and a kind of willful approach to depth of field make her collages oddly disturbing, reserved—even bleak. Sitting flatly on black oversized pages, they nevertheless possess a kind of poetic charm, sequenced without captions and thereby revealing little autobiographical information about the poet herself.

07.28.09     Comments (0)     digg | del.ic.io.us | reddit