My Vocabulary Did This: Propagation Poetics

On my kitchen table, I currently have rubber bands wrapped around an attempt at grafting two cactuses together. The top part looks like a pine cone and the bottom resembles a ribbed green star. The result is temporarily living under a glass dome in case my cat tries to eat it while it’s healing. I am not a particularly skilled or informed gardener. I did a little online research to see if these plants were compatible but when that was inconclusive, I ended up just cutting them in a moment of carelessness and sticking them together to see what would happen; I am more of a Dada botanist by nature.

I notice that I have a slightly different experience with a plant that has emerged from throwing a seed in the ground and forgetting about it, carefully sowing a seedling indoors then hovering over it nervously, tearing off a leaf and dipping it in rooting compound, grafting sections together, or discovering one spontaneously popping out of random cracks in the ground. The quality of discovery and the degree of connection varies. A different species of awe inhabits me.

I bring this up in the context of poetry because I have used various “cut-up”-inspired processes in my writing for around 20 years. During that time, I have used cut-ups to generate new writing when I felt stuck, to antagonize settled patterns that I wanted to work against, and to deliberately extend gestures and to create echo systems across a manuscript. Gradually, I have come to understand cut-ups as a set of incredibly varied techniques, rather than as one specific type of writerly tool or one particular kind of aesthetic result. I am trying to think more affectionately and intimately about a technique that can often be described in terms that imply the mechanical or the violent (though there is a complex, constructive lineage of those impulses as well.) Obviously, I didn’t invent the cut-up or its many variants, but I hope it might be worth articulating some of the pragmatic aspects of having worked with them over an extended period of time.

Lately, I am much more interested in what happens after the cut than in the dramatic act of cutting itself. Though the idea of the “cut-up” might seem to imply an instant discovery, the moment the mediumistic scissors function like a planchette, I try to give my cuttings some time to dry, to grow stranger, away from my eyes. I like to put them in a drawer for a while until the impulse that created them dissipates a little. I try to collaborate with my forgetfulness and to make space for their particularity.

The attitudes, metaphors, and expectations that one brings to these procedures make noticeable differences in the outcome. In my experience, it’s all very “set and setting.” It is possible to want a certain kind of result too immediately or to be hypnotized by the too easy novelty of clever dead-ends. I find that I have to want it to work but I can’t be too attentive at a granular level while I’m doing the cuts and assemblies. Working with this process consistently for years has given me access to some gradations of writing consciousness that are difficult for me to tap into via other methods.

Sometimes I will use a cut-up strategy to compost a vocabulary set that is being stretched too thin. In that case, I might go in with a certain amount of intention, for example, when I’m burning out on certain nouns. I have always appreciated the kind of cut within a word that would change a cloud into an oud. Cut-ups, in this sense, behave like a tool for sudden transformation between states of being. An element of weather can suddenly become a musical instrument via the elision of one consonant cluster. In botanical terms, in the language of cacti, one might consider this weird growth to be a “pup” that might be used to propagate another landscape, another soundscape, another self.

I mainly use my own work (a combination of failed fragments and fully formed pieces) as source material for cut-ups, though I have occasionally broken this habit. I do this for a few practical reasons. I feel comfortable using my own texts because I can be confident that I’m not transgressing someone else’s authorial autonomy in a destructive way. I also like seeding my work with little partial echoes and traces across different books. It can give a work an eerie feeling of familiarity without hammering the reader with the same vocabulary over and over. Finally, I find that writing in this way actually changes my thinking patterns outside of poetry. It helps me to notice habits that have become tiresome and new paths that I want to follow. If you work with them long enough, cut-ups actually seem to open up consciousness in a number of ways.

Cut-ups are a writing process, but they are also an evolving practice. During one period of my writing life I taught myself how to write like a cut-up without using the technique. During other times, I have tried to use these techniques in a way that intentionally obscured the seams and ripples they often leave behind. I try not to believe in them as a solution to every writing problem but I also like to keep them nearby when I need to perturb a piece that is drifting into readymade territory.

Because I write prose poems, I especially appreciate the way cut-ups allow me to graft together a shapely sentence out of scraps and glistening shards. The under-drawing of normative syntax can be a great scaffolding to magnetize language around. This incarnation of the process permits more of my conscious mind to enter, when, for example, I’m fishing for declarative statements or multi-clausal questions. Working with the basic boundary of the sentence seems to give me a rough sense of scale to work from.

To return to the damaged cactus on my kitchen table tonight, I want to suggest that the process of grafting together sentences at a modest, medium-sized, less atomized scale, is like working with two parts of a cactus, one top and one bottom. Creating an extended, more elaborated work out of this impulse might be more like building an intricately grafted tree that grows different fruit from every branch.  In the meantime, I am working on a more modest scale, hoping that a wounded pine cone and a green column of bisected stars can share a body.