Last Poems–Outsider Art

JT Gillett is a regular guy: 55 year-old writer, working stiff, father and husband. He’s grateful he has a full-time job, and produced the poetry, sculpture and art on this blog in his spare time. It’s no big deal.

Poetic experience is nothing special, either. Studied with Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs at Naropa Institute (1978); kept a small press alive for five years (Homunculs, Eugene, OR 1979-1984), graduated from University of Oregon (1978), wrote hundreds of poems for professors, beatniks, hipsters and squares–a few dozen were published by small literary journals, including This Is My Last Poem, which was edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and appeared in City Lights Review #6: Ends & Beginnings (1994).

Max Ernst provided my window into the possibility of the collage, and I appreciated all the surrealist experiments I could lay my eyes upon. The wilder, the better. The collages presented here were created by hand–just like Max used to do it–using an Exacto blade, paper and glue.

The black and white  specimens were designed for easy, affordable reproduction and published in a handful of literary magazines, including George Hitchcock’s Kayak (1984). The b&w collages were created in the mid-1980s and combine dozens of images from a variety of sources, including resized photocopies. The color collages are much simpler in nature, and attempt to elicit a more immediate impact on the viewer.