Last Friday, I decided to try something different. My daughter was off school sick, which meant cancelling all my plans. I couldn’t even go out of the house, and all I had to entertain us both was a pile of old newspapers and some biscuits. We ate all the biscuits, and then we started flicking through the newspapers. Then I spotted an interesting headline, and a line here and there and another. Before I knew it, I was chopping up the newspapers, making poems out of the lines. Yep, you guessed it, I had discovered Cut and Paste poetry!
Cut-up as a technique is, of course, nothing new. It goes back to the 1920s when, during a Dadaist rally, Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. Collage, which was popularized roughly contemporaneously with the Surrealist movement, sometimes incorporated texts such as newspapers or brochures. Prior to this event, the technique had been published in an issue of 391 in the poem by Tzara, dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love under the sub-title, TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM.
It was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts. Many famous writers have incorporated the cut and paste technique into the work, most notably TS Elliot in the Wasteland. Both David Bowie and Kurt Cobain experimented with cut-up techniques, writing their own paragraphs or poems and then cutting them up and reassembling them to create new and surprising lyrics.
So here’s what I did:
1. Select two newspaper articles at random. Longer features work best as they tend to include more descriptive words.
2. Skim through and underline any particular words or phrases that catch your eye. Don’t think about the meaning, just choose what sounds interesting or surprising.
3. Do this for both newspaper articles. When you have finished, either physically cut out or write down the words/phrases you’ve chosen.
4. Reassemble the phrases from the two articles, in whatever order you like. This could be completely at random (drawn out of a hat) or, as I did, linking phrases which seemed to work together stylistically.
5. Admire your new, shiny poem.
Some of my examples are given at the end.
A WORD OF WARNING: Borrowing other people’s words is plagiarism! There’s a very fine line between reusing a word in a different context and stealing somebody else’s work. So I’d recommend doing this only for your own amusement, not for publication. It’s about playing with words and having fun, remember, NOT stealing other people’s words and claiming them as you own!
Alternatively, make like David Bowie and try this method instead:
1. Think of a subject, any subject. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, how to make the perfect cup of tea.
2. Think of another unrelated subject, say how you felt in a recent relationship.
3. Write a paragraph on each subject. Don’t think too hard. You want it to be a stream of consciousness.
4. Cut up the lines of both and reassemble in a random order.
5. Ta da! Your very own David Bowie lyric!
Here’s what happened, for example, when I combined a poem I’d previously written about the sea with a description of a friend suffering from depression:
Threnody
Blue and grey, rolling with rain,
And the darkness moved in,
Spreadeagled an invitation,
White limbs lost to a pitiless tide
Bent and twisted,
Tongued by lolling waves,
You shouted all night to keep the voices out,
An abandoned layer of bones,
Painted your arms red to feel something real
Whirlpool clouds made of steel and dust
Loom long and heavy on the other side.
NEWSPAPER CUT AND PASTE EXAMPLES:
Final Home/Love triangle
One the mudflats of the River Roach
A love triangle involving two giants,
The clear outline was produced
thanks to a drone fitted
with a specialist camera –
Clue of an adulterous relationship,
An enigmatic figure in the background,
Burgeoning romance,
Dangerously sexual feelings,
Darwin’s ship
Circumnavigating
A static watch vessel.
Google Doodle/Clocks Back
Nobody wants to go to and from work in darkness
A Google doodle may sound trivial
In the face of awesome creativity,
1.5 billion users active daily
So, winter is coming,
A twee-looking woman holding a notebook
Gazing up at the stars,
We could twiddle the clocks to achieve
All-year-round summer
She could almost be smiling,
The winter trees around her
Look almost festive –
A lipsticked woman holding a compact mirror,
The titles in swirling cursive:
Yes, ‘cheery’ was ironic.
A Load of Hot Air
I’m folding all my clothes wrong,
according to Mari Kondo,
I’ve consumed dubious tonics and teas –
Transformation to fluid experiments in style,
A painting made in extreme close-up.
Breathing is unconscious –
Inhale and exhale –
Staring at pale flesh with a
grim butcher’s intensity,
When I’m jostled by a rushing commuter,
Carving them up in the mind’s eye,
Fretted, fleshy tones and textured mottle,
bring me back to an even keel,
Silhouetted by the merciless dawn light,
Hands thrust in pockets,
The painter locks eyes with us
in the space beyond.
I Like the Stress of a City
Stark evidence of faultlines developing
Between hardline and conciliatory elements
Within the chaos,
Sending shockwaves,
Police armed with batons
Throw stones and flares, grappling.
You find your own oasis,
The white sands covered by the grey,
The catch is worthless and often dumped:
Every now and then
I fling it all up in the air
And see where it lands.
