Cut up poems

In this post I am going to explain how I used the cut-up technique for my project. The technique of creating Dadaist poems is a process when you pick out random words from your cut ups and put them together to create a poem that doesn’t necessarily have a great grammatical structure. However, I decided to just rearrange the original text in order to give it a new meaning, like in the original cut up technique.

I laid out all the cut out words in front of me on a clear surface in a chaotic order. I tried to look at them with a blank mind and just mindlessly pick out the words that struck my attention for some reason thus forming some sort of associations.

       

I then put the words that I picked next to each other and I could see that almost every time I did it, the words related to each other in one or the other way. For example, as you can see on the picture below, I picked out “sadness”, “cold”, “uncertainty”, “control”, “anticipation” etc. I can relate this process to the “free association”. Free association is a practice in psychoanalytic therapy. In this practice, a therapist asks a person in therapy to freely share thoughts, words, and anything else that comes to mind. The thoughts need not be coherent

In traditional free association, a person in therapy is encouraged to verbalize or write all thoughts that come to mind. Free association is not a linear thought pattern. Rather, a person might produce an incoherent stream of words. They may also jump randomly from one memory or emotion to another. The idea is that free association reveals associations and connections that might otherwise go uncovered. People in therapy may then reveal repressed memories and emotions.

My approach was to try and apply the free association technique to my cut up words in order to let my subconscious guide me when picking out random words from a pile. I then took these words as a basis for my poem and tried to form structured sentences around them. Unlike with the other poems I wasn’t even trying to make my first poem rhyme.

    

I believe that the text that came out of this was based solely on what was going on on my subconscious at that time. I made it at the time when the virus was just emerging in the UK and first steps were taken to try to tackle it. Almost everyone was feeling worried, scared and a little lost.

With Dadaist poems being more of a surrealist technique, my approach to cut up acts more as a way of accessing the subconscious. I believe that it relates better to the theme of my project.

  

 

When making a poem I continued to pull out words from the pile which connected to each other in one or the other way. Then I have attempted to make a poem which actually rhymes by consciously picking up specific words for the endings of the sentances. It didn’t corrupt the notion of free association because they were still formed around the subconsciously chosen words.

These two poems don’t particularly have a strong semantic load. They were also made in a chaotic manner and thus they represent my thoughts. The rhymes just came out of nowhere and it was such a free flowing process, I guess because I got the hang of it.