(Almost!) 30 days of cut-up poems
I am so glad my colleague invited me to join her in writing a poem a day during the month of April for National Poetry Month. I'm a few poems short of 30, but I did commit to the method of cut-up and the daily exercise of engaging with text in this tactile way ignited something in my brain. David Bowie was famous for using this method to write song lyrics. This is how Bowie describes the magic of cut-up:
If you put three or four disassociated ideas together and create awkward relationships with them, the unconscious intelligence that comes from those pairings is really quite startling.
I keep a jar of words that I’ve cut up from various magazines and papers in my classroom. Sometimes, I’ll drop handfuls of these words on my students’ desks and ask them to arrange the words to form sentences and poems. One student shared that she loves this activity because it allows her to combine words she wouldn’t normally ship together. It’s the “disassociated ideas” that Bowie is talking about – the act of scrambling what our minds are used to seeing and breaking through conventions and cliches to discover new possibilities. I love Bowie’s description of “awkward relationships” – it’s that tension that art is striving for. We are excited by art that hums with energy, excited by tensions between characters that invite us to keep turning the page.
And Bowie is right that in the process of making new arrangements and “awkward relationships,” something magical unlocks in the unconscious. Not all of my cut-up poems from this month are good – some aren’t even poems, really. But the practice and discipline of working on such a granular and physical level with words helped attune my attention towards other things – I noticed that I read better this month, I wrote more fluidly in my journal, and when students were stuck on certain ideas, it felt easy for me to offer creative possibilities.
Here are my cut-up poems from this month, in the order that I made them. Day 1 appeared in the last post.
