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MEKTOUB: It is written.
I hope to keep updating this section with excerpts and quotes which will be of interest to both those "in the know" and those who are new to the world of appropriated poetry.
"You can't copyright no beats." Public Enemy
William S. Burroughs
Elisabeth Kley
Richard Kostelanetz
Ted Morgan
Tristan Tzara
THE CUT-UP METHOD
The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . . one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different-cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise-in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like. As many Shakespeare Rimbaud poems as you like. Tristan Tzara said: "Poetry is for everyone." And Andre Breton called him a cop and expelled him from the movement. Say it again: "Poetry is for everyone." Poetry is a place and it is free to all cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaud's place. Here is a Rimbaud poem cut up:
Visit of memories. Only your dance and your voice house. On the suburban air improbable desertions . . . all harmonic pine for strife.
The great skies are open. Candor of vapor and tent spitting blood laugh and drunken penance.
Promenade of wine perfume opens slow bottle.
The great skies are open. Supreme bugle burning flesh children to mist.
Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut-ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here write now. Not something to talk and argue about. Greek philosophers assumed logically that an object twice as heavy as another object would fall twice as fast. It did not occur to them to push the two objects off the table and see how they fall. Shakespeare Rimbaud live in their words. Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. Cut- ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter. Table tapping? Perhaps. Certainly an improvement on the usual deplorable performances of contacted poets through a medium. Rimbaud announces himself, to be followed by some excruciatingly bad poetry. Cut Rimbaud's words and you are assured of good poetry at least if not personal appearance.
All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound to kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going with his color of vowels. And his "systematic derangement of the senses." The place of mescaline hallucination: seeing colors tasting sounds smelling forms.
The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which
has been used by painters for seventy years. And used by the
moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or
still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passersby and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often
their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the
same. The best writings seems to be done almost by accident but
writers until the cut-up method was made explicit - all writing
is in fact cut-ups; I will return to this point-had no way to
produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity.
But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a
pair of scissors.
from: FABULOUS FORD
The idea of collaged poetry has a noble modernist lineage. Around 1924 Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love included instructions for cutting an article into separate words, putting the pieces in a bag, shaking the bag, and then copying the pieces in random order as they are removed. In 1936, the French Surrealist Georges Hugnet published Septième Face du Dé, a book of collages that included photographs and phrases cut from magazines. (This work, currently on view at Zabriskie Gallery, was discussed by Vicki Goldberg in the New York Times on Sunday, June 20.)
In the '50s, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin experimented with "cut-ups." "Cut right through the pages of any book or newsprint," they advised, "lengthwise, for example, and shuffle the columns of text. Put them together at hazard and read the newly constituted text." These techniques were extremely influential in avant-garde poetic circles at the time the "Poem Posters" were produced.
In Ford's collaged poems, advertising slogans and headlines are removed from their original context and subverted. Fallen Woman features a female figure sprawled on her back with her arms stretched out, as a hand holding a knife is poised above her body. The words "Plan now for" and "nowhere," along with other phrases, issue like flower petals from a circular central image of an unplugged drain, perhaps a reference to the victim's life draining away.
from : A NEW DICTIONARY OF THE AVANT-GARDES
FOUND POETRY: The found poet discovers poetry in language not her or his own. The simplest strategy is to break apart prose into lines with appropriately sensitive line breaks. William Butler Yeats took Walter Pater's prose evocation of the Mona Lisa and, retyping it into free verse, made it the initial poem in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). Some of Compte de Lautreamont's Chants de Maldoror (posthumously published in 1890) were, as scholars discovered, direct quotations an 1853 encyclopedia of natural history. With this likewise posthumous discovery in mind, consider this rationale for poetic plagiarism found elsewhere in his writings. "It stays close to the wording of an author, it uses his expressions, erasing a false idea and replacing it with a correct one." In 1965, the Times Literary Supplement published a serial debate over the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid's authoring of a poem that begins with a verse arrangement of another poet's short story. In introducing MacDiarmid's Selected Poems (1993), the critic and translator Eliot Weinberger finds that much of MacDiarmid's Cornish Heroic Songs for Valda Trevlyn (1937-38) are drawn from "long passages from obscure travel and science books, reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, Herman Melville's letters, the writings of Martin Buber, and Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger. John Ashbery acknowledged that his major early long poem "Europe" contains phrases lifted randomly from Beryl of the Biplane (1917), a children's book by William LeQueux.
The Canadian practitioner John Robert Colombo identifies the first book of wholly found poetry as John S. Barne's A Stone, A Leaf, A Door (1945), which consists entirely of the novelist Thomas Wolfe's prose broken apart to look like poetry. Bern Porter composed his "founds" from the words found in advertising slogans, appropriating typography as well as language, while John Cage has drawn on Henry David Thoreau and James Joyce, among others, for his shrewdly chosen source texts. Richard Kostelanetz has scrambled the opening pages of literary classics in his prose-looking Aftertexts (1987), and the opening pages of his own essays in Recyclings (1973; 1984), which he considers to be an implicit form of "literary autobiography". Though recent developments in the visual arts have given to "appropriation" a new authority that has, curiously, scarcely extended into literary appreciation, writers continue to remember T.S. Eliot's advice: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."
from LITERARY OUTLAW
Finally, Beckett leaned forward and said, "What can you tell me, Mr. Burroughs, about this cut-up method of yours?"
"Well, Mr. Beckett," Burroughs said, "what I do is take a page of my writing and a page of the Herald Tribune [or Rimbaud, etc.], I cut them up and then I put them back together, and I gradually decipher new texts. Then I might take a page of your writing, and line it up with what I already have, and do the same thing all over again."
Suddenly indignant, Beckett asked, "You're using other writer's words?"
"Words don't have brands on them the way cattle do," Burroughs said. "Ever hear of a word rustler?"
"You can't do that!" Beckett said. "You can't take my writing and mix it up with the newspapers."
"Well, I've done it," Burroughs said.
"That's not writing," Beckett snorted, "it's plumbing."
from: DADA MANIFESTO ON FEEBLE LOVE AND BITTER LOVE (Section 8)
To make a dadaist poem. Take a newspaper. Take a pair of scissors. Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem. Cut out the article. Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag. Shake it gently. Then take out the scraps one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. The poem will be like you. And here you are a writer, indefinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.
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