“When I was a small child there was a box in the attic containing neatly trimmed scraps of material that had once belonged to dresses, aprons, blouses, dish towels, and which were apparently intended for a quilt that never got made. I was fascinated by them and used to pour over them with the zeal of an Egyptologist. There was a language there.”

Writing isn’t anything more than arranging the scraps we’ve gleaned from other writers. The poet John Ashbery’s collages offer a pointed reminder of this.