Jiří Kolář composed the "action poems" in A User's Manual mostly in the 1950s before finishing them in the 1960s. Published in their complete form in 1969, they were paired with the 52 collages comprising Weekly 1967, the first of Kolář's celebrated series in which he commented visually on a major event for each week of the year. Taking the form of directives, largely absurd, the poems mock communist society's officialese while offering readers an opportunity to create their own poetics through the performing of the given directions, which in turn can serve as a guide to self-understanding. The collages on the facing pages of each poem are composed of stratified documents, image cutouts, newspaper clippings, announcements, letter fragments, reports, decontextualized words, oftentimes forming concrete patterns or the outlines of figures, to create a sort of "evidential" report on the events of that year. Text and image taken together, the volume displays Kolář's enduring interest in extracting poetry from the mundane to demolish the barrier separating art from reality, or even to elevate reality itself through this dual poetics to the level of art. What the art historian Arsén Pohribný wrote about Weekly 1968 equally applies to Weekly 1967, namely, that it "shocks with its abrupt stylistic twists" and is "a Babylonian, hybrid parable of multi-reality."
