In 1977, in a nod to the Surrealists, the conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady started cutting phrases out of The New York Times and rearranging them into lines of poetry, which she glued, mostly slantwise, onto sheets of rag paper: “Dinner is reserved for/Twin Speech: A Language of Their Own” reads one spliced fragment. She was in her early 40s. Fifteen years earlier, O’Grady had worked as an intelligence analyst for the federal government. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, she was tasked with reading around 10 international newspapers a day and, as she likes to say, “at a certain point, words just became gelatinous.” But from that experience O’Grady was able to extract new meaning out of language. “I did a poem a week, and when I got to the four-month mark, they started taking off, and I could tell something was happening,” she says, though the knowledge that her own ideas could carry her from one place or plane to the next must have already been familiar. In addition to her time in Washington D. C., her pre-artist life included stints as a translator, a teacher, a student of fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and, as if she weren’t already intimidating enough, a rock critic. “I don’t feel I’ve had much unlived life,” says O’Grady, now 86.