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Cut-Up Poetry

After enough spare time spent sorting through old files and notebooks, I have produced a pile of unwanted writing: drafts, failed poems, etc. The pile is large enough that I would regret throwing it away. It is so much. It occurred to me that I could cut out anything remotely salvageable, and then make a collage out of the pieces. This should be fun, if not productive.

I have scanned the first result, but I will probably type the others.

the Lazurus’ Corporation’s brief explanation of cut-up for the uninitiated

The Cut-Up technique is to writing what collage is to visual art. Its recent use was pioneered by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and later David Bowie used it during the 1970s. The basic method is simple - write a piece of work, cut the paper up with scissors, and rearrange the pieces to form new phrases and new meanings.

“The best writing seems to be done almost by accident, but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit … had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.”
William Burroughs, RE/SEARCH #4/5, 1982

Obviously, using this method can and will produce results which you’re not happy with, but the surprising thing is how many of the results are successful. Sometimes all that is needed is a quick read through of the results, adding punctuation and deleting the occasional word to produce the finished results. Purists might complain about editing the cut-up text, but this process is a tool which you can choose to use at any stage in the process of writing.

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Comments to “Cut-Up Poetry”

Dylan Kinnett Says:
March 11th, 2006 at 4:26 pm

As it happens, there is software out there to make the cut-up method very easy. Simply paste the text to be operated upon into a form, select some options, and presto! A cut-up.

See for yourself at
http://nocategories.net/textmixingdesk/

The name of the software I’ve installed at that address is the Lazarus Corporation’s text mixing desk. Here is the Lasarus Corpotation’s explination of their software.

Taking their inspiration from the philosophy of sampling, William Burroughs’ cut-up technique, Jeff Noon’s “Cobralingus” project and too many long nights spent on music mixing desks, art-text-terrorists the Lazarus Corporation have created an online mixing desk - for writing.

The text mixing desk manipulates your writing with a succession of outboard effects - such as the “transgenderiser”, which swaps the sex of any gender-specific words faster than a Thai plastic surgeon, and the Burroughs inspired “cut-up engine” which takes a pair of scissors to your work and dances gleefully on the bleeding remains of your carefully constructed sentences.

But why on earth would you want to mangle your precisely worded prose in this way? Well, the Godfather of Beat and author of “Naked Lunch”, William S Burroughs, explains it best:

“The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit … had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.”

…or in the case of the Lazarus Corporation’s text mixing desk, with some sharply written lines of code. This is, after all, the 21st century.

Cut-Up Poetry

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