Poetry Moment – A Cut Up Poem

The cut-up poem was a technique developed by the writer William S. Burroughs. He was inspired by a painter in France who used a similar technique with his paintings. When Burroughs saw what his friend was doing, he immediately began to experiment with text. 

An example of a cut up poem is when you take a page of existing text – say, a page from your favorite novel – and cut it up into fragments. Individual words, letters, phrases…whatever you feel like working with. Once you’re finished, you then rearrange the pieces into something new.

I created one several years ago and I thought it turned out fairly well. So, for my National Poetry Month theme this month I thought I would do another. 

I decided to use a few pages from one of my favorite novels, Crime and Punishment. I went to Project Gutenberg to find a copy of the novel, printed a few pages from the beginning of Chapter 6, then grabbed my scissors and got to work slicing and dicing the text. 

Now, there are two ways to go about this. One is to read over the selected page(s) and find words and phrases that you can string together. I always go with the second option, which is to not think about it and simply cut out random bits and pieces. I think this challenges me and offers more opportunity for creativity. 

So that’s what I did. Here’s a photo of the random bits I excised from the pages I printed.

And here is the final version. I wrote it out below (with the weird punctuation) since the text in the photo may be hard to read.

I would laugh at them,

he said with bitterness.

I understand how annoying it is,

facts that can’t be avoided,

He raised his head.

and he was breathing heavily.

His ideas were all tangled

his hair was soaked with sweat

And that, that is what they found

an unexpected and alarming idea had occurred

I feel vexed as it is,

with gloomy repulsion, obviously

, he suddenly fancied that something

that I condescended to speak to

strange, humiliated, half senseless smile

to give an air of truth,

you were wrong.

Is it great poetry? No, not really, but it is a fun way to test my creativity and do something new and unusual. 

Have you ever made a cut up poem? If not, give it a try and let me know how it goes.

RB