Well, it’s finished, or at least I’m done with it. Maybe my cut-up poetry wasn’t a success. I found myself “cheating” (not that it matters) by rearranging the randomness, picking deliberately, editing the results, etc. In the end, there were only three results I could call a finished poem, and they’re short.

The lackluster feeling I have about this “experiment”* is probably related to the feelings that led me to cut up those old poems in the first place. I took the relatively few salvageable lines from a sizeable pile of discarded poems, and, like cut fruit, the pieces themselves quickly turned brown and unappealing.

Anyway, without further ado, and without any further, hemming, hawing, excuses or other dalliance, I bring you my cut-up poems:

• Cut up poem # 1
• Cut up poem # 2
• Cut up poem # 3

Cut-up is one of those avant-garde literary tricks that probably gets discussed more than it is done, read about more than it is read, etc. I imagine the initial inspiration for it was well intended — looking at a collage and thinking: why didn’t I say that? Well, you can’t exactly say a collage. Or, you can, but it won’t make sense. A collage doesn’t need to make sense, or, it does but not in the same way. If the items in a collage look good together, as an arrangement, then the collage is aesthetically pleasing. I think it is difficult for words to be arranged rather than composed together, if they are to be pleasing anyway. Yeah, sure, words don’t have to be pleasing. Eat a fart! Go away.

I think it would help “ease the pleasing” so to speak if there were some relationship among the parts before they are randomly chosen. Perhaps each part pertains to a theme — like having a box of blue things to make a collage with. Maybe each snippet of text describes an emotion — like having a pile of objects with a certain texture. Then, just as I could sit down and make a collage that is blue and bumpy, I could make a cut up poem that achieves an effect, while retaining its spontaneity.

* I hate to use the word experiment with regard to anything creative. (Now that I’m not in school, I’ve had to watch my mouth in general.) My friend Lindsay certainly summed it up well, at a recent party. We were drawing on things with her favorite paint markers. Someone asked her, “Oh, are you experimenting with those markers?” and she glibly replied, “No, I’m drawing with them.”