I cut and pasted. Composition as explanation. And I noticed that if you pasted a picture of an American black man or boy from the 1930s, 40s, 50s into almost any bucolic or monumental setting, the kind of thing you’d find on a picture postcard, you had a whole different thing going, and it wasn’t surrealism.  Surrealism was putting a snake in the pilot’s seat or a teacup on a woman’s crotch. This wasn’t that. So why was the effect so strange? Why was it we had never seen such men in such settings? Why did three beautiful boys laughing and yielding a stick seem menacing against the background of flowers in Kew Gardens?  

I was reading a lot of Wallace Stevens then, particularly his letters, which I had re-issued as an editor at the University of California Press. When I came to this letter to his wife, dated May 1, 1918, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

Last evening a train of negroes that had been drafted passed through Johnson City on the way to camp. The station was crowded with negroes. When the train pulled in there was a burst of yelps and yells. The negroes on the platform ran up and down shaking hands with those in the cars. The few white people who happened to be near took an indulgent attitude. They regard negroes as absurdities. They have no sympathy with them. I tried to take that point of view: to laugh at those absurd animals, in order to understand how it was convenable that one should feel. But the truth is that I feel thrilling emotion at these draft movements. I want to cry and yell and jump ten feet in the air; and so far as I have been able to observe, it makes no difference whether the men are black or white. The noise when the train pulled out was intoxicating.

There it was: racism, the American strangeness, the limits of the young Wallace Stevens observing it from his position as poet, aesthete, citizen, and heir to a disgrace: the intoxication with soul and the contempt for the ”absurd” creatures who had it. These souls were nothing but spectacle to the “real” Americans, “indulgent” whites, sedentary, pinched, and dangerous in their smug self-regard. But Stevens was not just a white man in a racist society, he was a poet. And on some level he understood that the vitality, the yelling and jumping, were not an absurdity but the essence of humanity. Hence the feeling of joyous contagion that trumps the pose Stevens tries to fake. In the end, Stevens the poet makes a leap that Stevens the American white man cannot make. The poet can’t quite sustain the detachment and “indulgence” of the racists he tries to emulate in the name of white American entitlement and “maturity.”

What is civilization? What was it to Stevens, and what is it to me? The well-wrought urn in the wilderness of America, or the song of those who carry it up the hill? I read Stevens’ Anecdote of the Jar as I cut and pasted Negroes into pictures of manicured formal gardens and autumn in Vermont and colonial New England and temples and ruins attesting to the greatness of Western Civilization:

I placed a jar in Tennessee, 

And round it was, upon a hill. 

It made the slovenly wilderness 

Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it, 

And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion every where. 

The jar was gray and bare. 

It did not give of bird or bush, 

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

I thought of the pictures I had seen of lynchings, and of white Americans picnicking and laughing near burnt corpses of black men, and for a while it was my project to put American black men in the place of the mythical jar, to situate them as a civilizing influence, a question mark, in a wilderness of false civilization that marked them as savage.

I dedicated those collages, and some poems I wrote, to Duke Ellington’s great collaborator, the cultivated, gay, alcoholic composer Billy Strayhorn, and to a new friend, Claudia Rankine, a poet who was civilized and angry in a way that helped me re-think the idea of civilization and wilderness and the anecdote of the jar.  She and her husband adapted one of those collages for use on the cover of her second book, Plot, so one of the boys from the junk heap at the 23^rd Street flea market lives a new life.

When Claudia reads aloud in public, she has a peculiar cadence, a deep, thick, controlled tone, as if an archaic torso were declaiming, as if rocks could talk. In her voice I hear flowing lava before it has had time to harden. Her name rings ancient and sepulchral to me, perhaps because I once saw an inscription on a stele in a museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, translated from the Latin: Happy Claudia, free at last—

“Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. In other words, it is the natural history to which his stories refer,” wrote Walter Benjamin. So the Claudia of the stele, and the anonymous people in the photographs I love, have earned their right to haunt me and inform me. And I remember their authority as I re-imagine their stories.

It is somehow harder for the dead to disappear now. What can we do with all they leave behind? In the age of representation they leave so many traces—photographs, documents, hard drives, audio and videotapes, the junk that is destroying a planet that may not outlive us by an eternity.