Christoph Girard appeared in Issue 36 with three eleven-line poems: Confederate, Plein Air, and Dunny. Collage, public language, war vocabulary, painting, weather, and exterior space give the group its abrasive momentum.
Christoph Girard in the historical archive
Issue 36’s contributor note places Girard in the MFA program at UC Santa Cruz and describes his collage poetry as a way of creating a symbolic relationship with the exterior. It also names a recent series of eleven-line poems, Ten and One Left, concerned with public language written and translated by an outsider addressing a busy public world.
Confederate
Confederate assembles war, roads, orbit, bridges, ricin, canvas, resin, deposits, consumption, flights, and partitions into a sequence of pressured statements. Military and material vocabularies repeatedly cross, giving the poem the texture of damaged public speech.
Plein Air
Plein Air begins with beautiful words and immediately brings them into contact with cleanup, carnage, fear, veins, reclamation, crisis, storm, and soliloquy. The title’s painting term meets a poem whose exterior world feels exposed to conflict.
Dunny
Dunny returns to canvases, bristles, grounds, skyline, desire, violence, thunderstorms, lyrics, sun, guilt, and gender. Painting language and unstable weather occupy the same eleven-line frame.
Collage and public language
Across the three poems, Girard builds meaning by placing charged fragments in rapid succession. Repeated references to surfaces, landscape, violence, performance, and speech make the series feel continually open to the world beyond the page.
Further reading
Continue through the archive’s guide to imagery in poetry, its page on sound in poetry, and its overview of modern poetry.