Portrait Of The Cut-Up Artist As A Young Man

Between 1994 and 1998 I worked on a series of poems using variations on the Cut-Up technique. It started during a business seminar in 1994. I randomly jotted down things people said around the room day after day. Sometimes a single word, sometimes a phrase and sometimes full sentences. I then took random excerpts from these pages and assembled them in loose narrative poems.


By August 1995 when the picture was taken during a holiday in Dublin (the picture was taken by my wife Kate in the apartment we had rented for the week) I was cutting up magazines and newspapers. Headlines, advertisements, classifieds: the works. Often single words, sometimes more. This time the assemblage phase involved literally pasting the clipped pieces into a notebook. Such as this one which started life under the title of:








By the third and final stage around 1997-1998 I was no longer collecting words and phrases but simply riffing off any available stimuli. Pictures, TV, Films (one poem "Cigarettes and Genitals" was written watching the movie Body Heat), anything. I would simply jot down a semi-stream-of-consciousness word montage that both described the stimulus material and yet formed a narrative of its own.

The final poem came together during the 1998 World Cup Finals and then I stopped. It just ran out of road. I started a new job the day after the final and suddenly had less time for writing and without consciously thinking about it stopped writing poetry all together.

I didn't attempt to have any of the series published a) because I assumed they were unpublishable and b) because I just wasn't paying attention to such things. Actually I was woefully ignorant of the mechanics and realities of seeking publication. The few poetry magazines I was aware of certainly did not publish anything like the poetry I was writing/creating at the time. I have to admit that I had not heard of things like Eric Gregory awards until I read about them in the biographical notes in Identity Parade this year. I knew no one else that read poetry never mind wrote the stuff.

During the summer of 2010 I picked the project back up. I brushed up on editing techniques at the suggestion of Neil Astley (via a one on one session booked during the Ledbury Festival) in the form of a Pascale Petit download from the Poetry School (did such things as poetry festivals and the Poetry School exist in 1998?), and in I went.

I edited a little here and there. Re-cut some longer pieces into short segments. Completely re-assembled one or two. The results are the results. A few have been sent out into the world and so far one Diet Drugs has been accepted and along with two flash fiction pieces for the thirteenth installment of The Delinquent which is out in early 2011.

If there are lessons here it is a) we are not necessarily the best judges of our own work b) the internet has made it a whole lot easier for outsiders to make sense of "The Poetry System" (by outsiders I mean those of us who did not go to university never mind continue with creative writing masters followed by poetry apprenticeships of some kind within the walls and therefore do not routinely encounter in life the people with the knowledge) and c) never give up on old work, a revisit after a cooling off period (OK 12 years may be excessive!) and armed with the editor's scalpel may yield fruit.