Successions
Renee LaGue

Visiting Gary was overwhelming. There was just so much information, so
many directions I could take with my project. As I sorted through this
information, I became increasingly interested in the idea of
succession. Things are always changing. Nothing is static. Plants
overtake rusting buildings; landfills extend into lakes; power plants
are built on dunes.

As a creative writing major, I wanted to use this project to play with
the ideas of text and image. I wanted to challenge conventions. What
is poetry? What is art? What are they "supposed" to be about? I wanted
to put nature and industry together as startlingly as they appeared in
Gary. Both nature and industry are built landscapes. Over 100 houses
were bulldozed in order to make the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

I chose the collage form as a way to combine text and image, research
and writing in a chaotic and complicated manner. It is a confused
tangle, succeeding and succeeding around the viewer. There is no one
spot of origination; it is leading nowhere in particular.

Along the way, I realized that the drafts of my poems were themselves
a type of succession and needed to be included in my collage. To this
end, I discovered I couldn't "finish" any one poem as I had been
trying to do. The ecological concept of climax communities has been
debunked. Succession doesn't end. So I took bits and pieces of the
poems I'd written and used them to form new wholes, creating drafts
from my drafts.