Write poetry like Byron!
No, make that Brion
Mismatched by default: Clijsters, Tzara and Gysin
“Writing is fifty years behind painting,” the American idea machine and would-have-been surrealist Brion Gysin said, decades after inventing the cut-up technique for writing in the mid-1950s. Wait a second, if Gysin invented it, what about Tristan Tzara’s recipe for making 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 in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.
I chose a short article at random and it happened to be about tennis champ Kim Clijster having a baby. Congratulations, Kim, but I’m afraid the dada cut-up spun out a tragic ending:
World Leo Clijsters and in Belgian spokesman of international before have a delivered Belgium player Kim are east Belgian May No 1 made the soccer Jada to child well, Clijsters of Wednesday a family gave Limbourg Former former and on wishes retired both and daughter The year in her which in birth father cancer mother the she who birth baby died one was to last.
The “poem” is nothing like me at all. What was Tzara thinking?
In another experiment, I cut out words from different articles, trying not to see what they were, but at the same time trying to be sure I had some articles and conjunctions. It’s got a nicer ring to it and seems a bit more poetic at least:
Had not been into that companies tongues, the seething a in various was the watchword middleweight An working a barbershop yesterday haircut pretending They’re campaign The contrast was Burmese the solved presence Revised the holiday The research become readers are flats.
