This cracked me up: "At a surrealist rally in the 1920's Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theatre."
Hahahaha - same. It's a side of Burroughs I never understood when I first started reading him back in my late teens - he is very funny! And often accentuates this in super dry ways. Not sure how true the riot bit is - seems like Dadaist myth-making - but its a laugh riot either way.
Hi dick, love the article. I have been make collage poetry for 25 years. Check out my group site at collagepoetry.com and I post on my Substack Touchonian.com
My typical method is to collect snippets of text from things I am reading. That way I am working on poetry as I read things. I collect the lines randomly in a word doc and then when there are enough lines I start arranging them. No two lines come from the same place. I put bridge words of my own [in brackets] and I might adjust the punctuation or I might not.
another technique I have used for gathering material is using a set of random words as a search term
Here is a collage poem from 2006 where the title was used as a search term and then material was selected from resulting search results.
I also have used a 100 other techniques 'of opportunity' when I see them. Endless fun. Though I don't write anything myself, my voice is in the process of dreaming up these techniques and the kinds of materials I gather and what I end up with as the final result. I am a collage artist so I am always trying to come up with ways to extend the field using chance and serendipity.
Lovely stuff! And thanks for the kind words. :-) Subb'd to the Collage Poetry newsletter - really liked what I saw, and looking forward to having a proper hunt around! The rest of my poetry isn't technically "collage" in the trad. sense of the word, but it all employs techniques of "assemblage" and so on, and "cutting/joining" techniques of haikai which also has a relationship to collage, etc. :-) Thanks again for reading, and the links - hopefully will see ya round the poetry newsletter world.
Dick, I'm a little conflicted with this one. We try to be precise with our words and patterns when we write a poem. We struggle to find the perfect word at times. Picking words from a hat sounds like fun. I'm not sure it's for me. On the other hand, I understand the idea of the abstract. Looking at the entire work without regard for order is another art form.
Hehe - yeah, it ain't for everyone. I tend to look at it as just another technique. It really helped me get out of my own head, and find new ways of seeing connections between words and concepts. Loosened up my approach to "cutting" and "joining" in poems. For me, it was also connected to the idea that I was born into a language that is not my own - which I had no hand in constructing. And so the cut-up allowed me to intervene into language, and see it from different perspectives, to allow for linguistic creation, as well as organisation (which is connected to Deleuze's idea of the "body-without-organs", borrowed from Artaud).
And while the "picking words out of a hat" was the Dada provocation, cut-up as a technique has a lot more subtle applications I think, when combined with careful choice and selection. In the poems above, for instance, the original writing is by me, and was written to be cut-up. And then the poems I constructed from them are all carefully edited, and often only pick out a fragment of the words - kind of like a black-out poem of a cut-up novel haha. But yeah, not every technique is for everyone, for sure! Thanks as always for the thoughtful comment Rod - made me think, and rethink. :-)
I'm so glad that is the bit you picked out :-) It's one of my favourite quotes from Burroughs, and something I feel is typically ignored about his work, and the history of the avant-garde in general. So often I find the fandom (fanboys mainly, let's be honest) rigorously gatekeep the avant-garde, claiming it is only for "elite" art lovers, etc. - but in in my experience, most avant-garde movements have a wide openness at their heart. It's what I took away from experimental art, anyhow: poetry is for everyone! yes yes yes 💛
I'm not sure I'm totally in the right flow of Cut-Ups, but it was super fun to try. I chose a fact sheet on Ancient Greece from my kids' scratch paper (last year's worksheets). I cut it up into a bunch of different fragments, and then I chose six slips of paper at random. They still made too much sense so I cut each of them in half. I haven't changed the words but I did choose my own punctuation to try and make it make a little bit of sense.
Love this Margaret - it has some really nice turns of phrase in it created by the cuts. This one, for instance: "Family worshiped the gods, clothing the ancient Greeks." I would never think to phrase something this way on purpose, but there is such poetry in it, and it seems to reach deeper than phrasing it more sensibly would achieve. I don't think there's any "wrong flow" with cut-ups personally - but I think they can be a very freeing method to explore different ways of building relationships and combinations of images/concepts/words.
And I love the way you've made sense of it through punctuation. This is often a method I use - break with sense and the sensible, but then with punctuation allowing for the "structure of sense" to guide the reader, if that makes sense haha!
Thank you, Dick! It was such a fun exercise. My husband was putting the younger kids to bed and came in our room to grab something. He saw me sitting on our bed surrounded by little piles of cut up paper. All I had to say was “Writing prompt” and he got it :).
Damn. Riots!?! People were serious about their poetry.
On a tangent but slightly related note, have you heard of the Kendrick vs Drake beef? It was an awesome display of lyricism by Kendrick this spring. But the most recent development with his “Watch the Party Die”, followed by Lecrae’s “Ain’t Watch the Party Die”, and then Dee-1’s “Call It Like It Is” is just sublime.
I think the reports of "riots" here is mostly myth, rather than actual haha - the Dada crowd were big on myth making. Yeah, I followed the beef for a little bit - have been a fan of songs by both artists at different times (though I will find Drake difficult to enjoy moving forwards). Tbh I found the whole thing pretty depressing after a while. Appreciate the lyricism, but yeah, felt more like spectacle for spectacles sake after a while (which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the songs themselves). Complex!
As for the beef, I’d suggest giving this this latest trio of songs a listen, it’s no longer about Drake but the state of hip hop- more specifically, a condemnation of today’s ultra hedonistic fare.
McArthur’s Collection
Sun-baked stones & shingle
He caught one, his last
A flash of orange
The end of something
A kind of immortality
Vaults were built
Tiny, fragile things
Wings that looked like sunset
Before the tanks rolled in
Ohhhh - wow, this came out really great! The images are so striking and vital. The whole run up to the last line:
*
A flash of orange
The end of something
A kind of immortality
Vaults were built
Tiny, fragile things
Wings that looked like sunset
Before the tanks rolled in
*
Wow! Thanks so much for rising to the challenge, and nailing it!
Thank you. It was a fun experiment.
Super glad :-)
great one!
This cracked me up: "At a surrealist rally in the 1920's Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theatre."
Hahahaha - same. It's a side of Burroughs I never understood when I first started reading him back in my late teens - he is very funny! And often accentuates this in super dry ways. Not sure how true the riot bit is - seems like Dadaist myth-making - but its a laugh riot either way.
Hi dick, love the article. I have been make collage poetry for 25 years. Check out my group site at collagepoetry.com and I post on my Substack Touchonian.com
Anytime you put noncontiguous things together it is a collage technique in my view.
Here is one of my collage poems that reminds me of your project here. I am looking forward to many pleasant moments on your substack.
Few are Left Who Believe
I was living around the corner [from]
a mythic world that existed at the beginning of time,
a single vast mirror gazing.
A time when many
had been working on the problem
of voice and gestures
aiming at the startling and revelatory.
The known voices died away [in]
[the] sounds of shadows that possess no future;
a quiet residential neighborhood
not far from the sea
full of sky.
The oldest come first to the ruins
to die in an old chateau
who had lived on from another time
and who had seen so many things.
When you look back there is always the past;
the dark passage they had no name for
included the work of contemporary poets
my brethren in the dream
Just sitting on the steps
And nobody knows them.
Few are left who believe.
From various sources starting from the blog: Poems and Poetics
My typical method is to collect snippets of text from things I am reading. That way I am working on poetry as I read things. I collect the lines randomly in a word doc and then when there are enough lines I start arranging them. No two lines come from the same place. I put bridge words of my own [in brackets] and I might adjust the punctuation or I might not.
another technique I have used for gathering material is using a set of random words as a search term
Here is a collage poem from 2006 where the title was used as a search term and then material was selected from resulting search results.
https://www.touchonian.com/p/allude-propitious-kindle
I also have used a 100 other techniques 'of opportunity' when I see them. Endless fun. Though I don't write anything myself, my voice is in the process of dreaming up these techniques and the kinds of materials I gather and what I end up with as the final result. I am a collage artist so I am always trying to come up with ways to extend the field using chance and serendipity.
Lovely stuff! And thanks for the kind words. :-) Subb'd to the Collage Poetry newsletter - really liked what I saw, and looking forward to having a proper hunt around! The rest of my poetry isn't technically "collage" in the trad. sense of the word, but it all employs techniques of "assemblage" and so on, and "cutting/joining" techniques of haikai which also has a relationship to collage, etc. :-) Thanks again for reading, and the links - hopefully will see ya round the poetry newsletter world.
This is such a wonderful look at this approach. As someone who likes to move blocks of text around, I really enjoyed these examples.
Aw cheers Amy! Really appreciate it. I'm a text mover-rounder too :-)
Dick, I'm a little conflicted with this one. We try to be precise with our words and patterns when we write a poem. We struggle to find the perfect word at times. Picking words from a hat sounds like fun. I'm not sure it's for me. On the other hand, I understand the idea of the abstract. Looking at the entire work without regard for order is another art form.
Hehe - yeah, it ain't for everyone. I tend to look at it as just another technique. It really helped me get out of my own head, and find new ways of seeing connections between words and concepts. Loosened up my approach to "cutting" and "joining" in poems. For me, it was also connected to the idea that I was born into a language that is not my own - which I had no hand in constructing. And so the cut-up allowed me to intervene into language, and see it from different perspectives, to allow for linguistic creation, as well as organisation (which is connected to Deleuze's idea of the "body-without-organs", borrowed from Artaud).
And while the "picking words out of a hat" was the Dada provocation, cut-up as a technique has a lot more subtle applications I think, when combined with careful choice and selection. In the poems above, for instance, the original writing is by me, and was written to be cut-up. And then the poems I constructed from them are all carefully edited, and often only pick out a fragment of the words - kind of like a black-out poem of a cut-up novel haha. But yeah, not every technique is for everyone, for sure! Thanks as always for the thoughtful comment Rod - made me think, and rethink. :-)
It’s my pleasure, Dick. I truly appreciate the detailed explanation. It’s helpful!
Yay - I always worry about over-explaining haha (it's the teacher in me), so it's really nice to hear it was helpful! :-)
Poetry is for everyone. Yes. Thank you. 💛💛💛
I'm so glad that is the bit you picked out :-) It's one of my favourite quotes from Burroughs, and something I feel is typically ignored about his work, and the history of the avant-garde in general. So often I find the fandom (fanboys mainly, let's be honest) rigorously gatekeep the avant-garde, claiming it is only for "elite" art lovers, etc. - but in in my experience, most avant-garde movements have a wide openness at their heart. It's what I took away from experimental art, anyhow: poetry is for everyone! yes yes yes 💛
"a wide openness at their heart" -- love that!
:-)
I'm not sure I'm totally in the right flow of Cut-Ups, but it was super fun to try. I chose a fact sheet on Ancient Greece from my kids' scratch paper (last year's worksheets). I cut it up into a bunch of different fragments, and then I chose six slips of paper at random. They still made too much sense so I cut each of them in half. I haven't changed the words but I did choose my own punctuation to try and make it make a little bit of sense.
.
Greece
.
Around an open courtyard
was a well and an altar.
Family worshiped the gods, clothing
the ancient Greeks.
.
Bread, feta cheese, olives
made from chickpeas:
shelter and spoon.
.
They drank occasionally
watered-down
only with men and women
women and their children.
.
The ancient Greeks
believed that the gods and all things,
Greek Gods were world.
.
The Greek countryside:
making land travel hard but
adventurers all passed through.
Love this Margaret - it has some really nice turns of phrase in it created by the cuts. This one, for instance: "Family worshiped the gods, clothing the ancient Greeks." I would never think to phrase something this way on purpose, but there is such poetry in it, and it seems to reach deeper than phrasing it more sensibly would achieve. I don't think there's any "wrong flow" with cut-ups personally - but I think they can be a very freeing method to explore different ways of building relationships and combinations of images/concepts/words.
And I love the way you've made sense of it through punctuation. This is often a method I use - break with sense and the sensible, but then with punctuation allowing for the "structure of sense" to guide the reader, if that makes sense haha!
Thank you, Dick! It was such a fun exercise. My husband was putting the younger kids to bed and came in our room to grab something. He saw me sitting on our bed surrounded by little piles of cut up paper. All I had to say was “Writing prompt” and he got it :).
Haha - that's amazing! Sounds like a good husband. :-) (also - sorry for the wrong name - must have seen the "Ann" and typed on autopilot - edited it)
No worries! 😁
Thanks this was a great read and I’m up for a challenge. Cheers.
A pleasure Kōtare! So glad you enjoyed it. Looking forward to seeing the results of the challenge :-)
Damn. Riots!?! People were serious about their poetry.
On a tangent but slightly related note, have you heard of the Kendrick vs Drake beef? It was an awesome display of lyricism by Kendrick this spring. But the most recent development with his “Watch the Party Die”, followed by Lecrae’s “Ain’t Watch the Party Die”, and then Dee-1’s “Call It Like It Is” is just sublime.
I think the reports of "riots" here is mostly myth, rather than actual haha - the Dada crowd were big on myth making. Yeah, I followed the beef for a little bit - have been a fan of songs by both artists at different times (though I will find Drake difficult to enjoy moving forwards). Tbh I found the whole thing pretty depressing after a while. Appreciate the lyricism, but yeah, felt more like spectacle for spectacles sake after a while (which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the songs themselves). Complex!
Hey whatever sells a paper!
As for the beef, I’d suggest giving this this latest trio of songs a listen, it’s no longer about Drake but the state of hip hop- more specifically, a condemnation of today’s ultra hedonistic fare.
Sweet - I'll check em out :-) Cheers for the recs!!!