All of We

About All of We

The visual poems in All of We are part of J.I. Kleinberg's expansive series of collages built from phrases that occur through the happenstance of magazine page design. For more than 15 years, Kleinberg has discovered, harvested, and recast these accidental lines into visual poems that find themselves at the intersection of Dada and Twitter, ransom note and haiku.

Within the poems, each contiguous fragment of found text is literally torn from its original sense and syntax and meant to be read as a poetic line. Kleinberg generally begins without a subject in mind. "I wait to discover what the magazine page has to tell me." The All of We series began with the found line, We the ocean (page 50). "There was a column break between We and the ocean, but I read across the gutter and recognized that familiar 'We the people' syntax."

"I had already been thinking about the current rhetoric of otherness and blame - the narcissistic I, the accusatory you, the divisive they. And the embracing we that acknowledges our flaws, mistakes, and losses along with our potent creative abundance."

Once she identified that distinctive language, Kleinberg searched for more examples. "I probably collected around 500 of these lines, saying to myself, Yes, we are this and this and this." Then, as with all the found poems, the lines had to find one another, fitting together in pairs and triads, shuffled around on the work table and the green background until they could be called poems.

The series could go on and on; All of We is a selection, a beginning, an invitation to inclusiveness.

Through a multitudinous embrace of revolutionary conversation, devastation, reparation, and resistance, J.I. Kleinberg's arresting All of We presents a visually compelling text of power, protest, paradox, and promise. Punctuated with colorfully re-constituted fragments of wounded syntax-where each ripped fragment, a poetics of witness-All of We poignantly exposes how the "we" contains the "me" and all that is ripped / rapt / wrought / fraught in the fragility of our contemporary socio-political condition. - Adeena Karasick, Professor of Literature and Media Studies, Pratt Institute