I’ve resisted writing a lot the past year; I find myself doing it everyday but I resist it anyway. How can something you enjoy be worth doing at all? I’ve given into this since starting this Substack, gaining a relatively realistic view of myself that just because I think I can do something like make a sculpture, sew a shirt or paint a painting doesn’t necessarily mean I want to do it or have the interest in it enough to learn how to do it. For me, writing offers an interest in the process and as a result the processes of other writers.
There is often wisdom passed along to seek the unknown within this, shoes to borrow and walk in. One of these techniques I’ve rediscovered recently is the ‘cut out’ technique that through my very limited research initially I thought David Bowie had come up with. He used it, like Drug Store Romeos who I got the recommendation from, but he didn’t come up with it.
The supposed original creator was a friend of Benjamin Franklin, Caleb Whitefoord. He describes it as:
“coupled persons and things most heterogeneous, things so opposite in the nature and qualities, that no man alive would ever have thought of joining them together.”
Writer Paul Collins continues to say that Whitefoord found this ‘amusing’, beginning from a place of play more than anything else. This state of play then continued a few decades later into the work of Dada poet, Tristan Tzara. The method is very simple:
Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. The poem will resemble you.
Through doing it myself, I find it easier to separate it into steps (and leave abit more choice about it):
Take a newspaper (the Independent is 90p and is full of very funny and what I imagine are mostly fake stories)
Take some scissors and tape
Pick out any words from the newspaper, be it articles, adverts etc.
Cut out enough words that when you place them on the table you have enough choice
Place them in an order without the need for it to be perfect, just for fun
Once placed, tape them down with one line of tape per line
Here are a few of mine:
As dissimilar my method is to the ‘original’ I still found it fun, even if at times it was restraining. It’s difficult borrowing someone else’s shoes to walk in, especially when it has gone through so many owners; the seams are coming apart, the fabric is worn and the only thing that’s new are the laces. But it’s worth a try anyway: the method is about re-editing things that are familiar, especially when ‘the words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition’. Give something new a try, make them your own, give them life again, even it gives way, unexpectedly, for a Tasmanian uniform in a European pizza express.