Cut-Up Technique
Quick answer: The cut-up technique makes new texts by slicing and rearranging existing ones. Trace it from Tzara to Burroughs and try it on your own poetry drafts.
The cut-up technique is a method of composition in which existing texts are physically sliced apart, with scissors, a blade or their digital equivalents, and the pieces rearranged into new sequences. Where collage selects fragments and places them by design, the cut-up invites chance into the arrangement itself: you cut, you shuffle, and you read what the accident proposes. The result exposes rhythms and images hiding inside familiar language.
Writers turn to cut-ups when their own habits have become a cage. Every poet develops default moves, favourite sentence shapes, reliable images, and the scissors do not know about any of them. A cut-up session will hand you combinations you could not have chosen, and choosing among accidents, it turns out, is still authorship. The technique also carries a whiff of prophecy its users enjoy: cut into the present, its most famous advocate claimed, and the future leaks out.
History and Key Figures
The Dadaist Tristan Tzara wrote the recipe first, around 1920: cut a newspaper article into individual words, shake them in a bag, and copy them out as drawn. The method's real flowering came in 1959 at the Beat Hotel in Paris, when the painter Brion Gysin sliced through layered newspapers while cutting a mount and noticed the columns produced uncanny sentences. His friend William S. Burroughs seized the discovery, using cut-ups throughout his Nova Trilogy and, with Gysin, theorising the practice in The Third Mind. The technique then leaked into music: David Bowie famously cut up his own lyric drafts, and songwriters have raided the method ever since.
How to Do It
Choose source texts with different temperatures: one of your own abandoned drafts, a news story, an instruction leaflet, a page of a field guide. Cut them into strips of two to six words, since single words give dust and whole sentences give lumps. Shuffle, then lay strips out and read aloud, moving pieces until three or four collisions spark. An invented sample of what emerges: 'do not exceed the stated forest / her voice, sold separately'. Transcribe the sparks, not the whole spread.
The digital version, scrambling paragraphs in a document or using a randomiser, works, but many practitioners swear by paper, because hands make discoveries screens skip.
From Accident to Poem
Treat the cut-up output as a quarry. Keep the phrases with voltage, discard the gibberish, and compose deliberately with what remains, adding your own connective tissue where the poem needs it. Purists publish raw cut-ups; most poets use the technique as a defibrillator for stalled drafts instead. Ethics are simple: transform thoroughly, credit recognisable sources, and prefer public domain or your own text when publication is the goal.
What poets can take from this
- Mix source registers: one lyrical text, one bureaucratic, one technical gives the richest collisions.
- Cut phrases of two to six words rather than single words or full sentences.
- Read arrangements aloud; the ear detects live combinations faster than the eye.
- Harvest three sparks per session instead of forcing a whole poem from one spread.
- Cut up your own stalled drafts; the technique is a superb second life for dead poems.
Try it yourself
Take a poem of yours that has failed at least twice, print it, and cut it into strips of three or four words. Add strips from one page of any manual or leaflet. Rearrange until you find three new lines, then rebuild the poem around them from scratch.
Questions
What is the difference between cut-up and collage?
Collage is curated: the poet selects fragments and arranges them by judgement. The cut-up delegates part of the arranging to chance, cutting and shuffling before judgement is allowed in. Many poems use both, a chance-generated spark refined by collage-style composition.
Are cut-up poems legal to publish?
Using your own texts or public domain sources, yes. Recognisable amounts of copyrighted prose can raise permission issues, so transform heavily, keep borrowings brief and credit sources. The safest rich source is always your own abandoned writing.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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