Out of Ashes / Creating / the / Atmosphere

When I first set out to teach found poetry to fourth graders at East Village Community School in New York City, I was guided by two questions: What does it mean to “find” poetry in the world around you? And how can we learn to view poetry as a way of finding oneself? 

The students and I had already approached some of these questions through our study of the cento and erasure forms, using the language of others to construct our own poems. Now we were ready to work with the cut-up method, but I was unsure how to implement this efficiently. I knew that if I gave my classes a stack of old magazines and equipped each kid with a pair of scissors, chaos could ensue. Besides, it would be impossible to scan every magazine I had acquired from the arts warehouse to ensure child-friendly language. 

On top of these anxieties, I found myself wracked with a more literary paranoia: what kind of message would it send to kids, anyway, if we took scissors to other people’s language? Wasn’t cutting up language that had been carefully constructed an inherently violent act? I decided to do the cutting in advance—not just for the aforementioned reasons, but also because, for the writing exercise itself, we would only have 20 minutes. I wanted to save the teachers from the madness of such a large-scale scissor-wielding operation in the classroom. So the night before, in the bitter cold of a dark New York City December, my boyfriend and roommate and I sat crowded around our glass coffee table in our Queens apartment, cutting up countless phrases and images.

What does it mean to “find” poetry in the world around you? And how can we learn to view poetry as a way of finding oneself?

Tristan Tzara, the Romanian Dada artist, had popularized the cut-up method in the 1920s. I planned to combine this approach with collage art. The week before, the students had created erasure poems with Alice in Wonderland as a source text; they had been inspired by Mary Ruefle, a contemporary poet whose work blends poetry and art. This time I wanted to up the ante, highlighting the similarities between collage and poetry more explicitly and offering students a bit more freedom. They would be able to move words around on the page and freely associate language and images. 

My other, more amorphous, aim was to nudge them towards an understanding of the importance of process: what was the value in creating poetry “the hard way,” when we could simply use technology to generate poetry with a Large Language Model (LLM)? Walking briskly to class that sunny afternoon in the unforgiving sub-20-degree weather, a bag of glue sticks and cutouts slung over my shoulder, I felt that I was doing a trust fall into the arms of Tyche, the goddess of chance. 

When 20 kids filed into the dimly lit classroom, antsy from a recess spent indoors, I projected a quote on the board: 

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 hat. Shake it gently. Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the hat. Copy carefully. The poem will be like you.

– Tristan Tzara, 1920

“When Tristan Tzara first suggested this method to write poetry, many of his fellow poets were very angry,” I told the group after reading the quote aloud. I had already told them about the century-old Dada movement, the principles of which they were starting to assimilate. “These other poets were so angry that they threw him out of their club! Why do you think that happened?”

A few tentative hands went up.

“Maybe they were angry because people were ruining other people’s poems by cutting them up?” Christina tried. 

“Very good point!” I said. “It’s true that many people care a lot about the words they write. Even words that others write. Why else?”

“Maybe because it was like he was tricking them,” Xander chimed in. 

“Right,” I said, nodding enthusiastically. “Maybe they thought Tristan Tzara wasn’t taking poetry seriously enough. Let’s think some more about this: who here has tried to write a poem, looked at a blank page, and not known where to start?”

Half of the kids’ hands shot up; the hands of the other half slowly followed. I, too, raised my hand and so did the classroom teachers.

“Alright. Now, let’s pretend you’re a group of poets who work hard at writing poetry. You’re part of a club. And then I, Tristan Tzara, come into your club and say: well, you can just cut up some words and put them into a hat, and shake it up, and then you will have a poem. Why would that make you feel angry?” 

“Because you would be saying you could make a poem so easily when it was so hard for us!” Marin called out. 

I shouldn’t have been surprised at how quickly they took to the form—how nimble they were in their manipulation of language, image, color, and shape. They were like fish released into water.

From here on out, they were ready. We moved to the second half of our lesson, examining the collages of the American artist Romare Bearden: beautiful, meticulously assembled layers of cut out papers, patterned materials and photographs. The kids were wowed by Bearden’s collages; suddenly, the excitement in the room was palpable. The connection was clear: like Tzara, Bearden was using materials he’d found in the world to make his artwork. 

Showing them slides from Bearden’s A Black Odyssey, I explained that the project had been a reworking of Homer’s epic poem from thousands of years ago. Someone compared this to the work of Mary Ruefle, who had used a book from the 19th century to make her own poem Melody, which we had studied the week before. We talked about how both artworks show the power of taking something that already exists and making it yours.

“Today, we will try a slightly different version of Tristan Tzara’s method,” I told them when it was time to get to work, placing boxes of cutouts onto each desk. “You’ll choose some lines from the boxes and arrange them into a poem, and then use the images, photographs, and shapes to create an illustration to go with it—a collage inspired by Romare Bearden.” 

I shouldn’t have been surprised at how quickly they took to the form—how nimble they were in their manipulation of language, image, color, and shape. They were like fish released into water. The words and images created a kind of contagious energy; poetry was no longer abstract, but something they could interact with visually and kinesthetically. Within 15 minutes, they had created some of the most breathtaking poems I’d ever seen from young writers. They were coming up to me, proudly asking me to read their work.

Mateo—a kid who had a propensity for making three-dimensional poetry, having used masking tape to prop up his images so that they stood upright on his mixed media paper in the previous class—called me over and asked me to read his poem before he glued it down:

the King of this land / was / Brilliant beyond all words, / distant shores / OUT OF ASHES / creating / the / atmosphere.

“It doesn’t make any sense though,” he said, grinning as I read it aloud, quietly beaming as if he knew a secret and wanted me to be in on it, too. 

“Are you kidding? Mateo, it’s brilliant!” I insisted. But he was showily blasé about his poem, more interested in searching through images; when I circled back around to him, I was dismayed to find that he had lost two of the strips before he could glue them down. I implored him to try to find the words, and we spent a good five minutes searching for them while the rest of the class added the finishing touches to their collage poems. Eventually, Mateo found one of the strips beneath his feet—triumphantly, he held it up to show me—and later, as I packed up my materials in the empty classroom, I spotted an errant slip of paper on the rug and picked it up. I was delighted to find that it happened to be the missing word, “creating.” I added it back in. 

 In a digital age where social media is the epitome of fragmentation, I thought perhaps collage—and its intrinsic link to poetry—could be just the thing the next generation needs.

That night, when I took a closer look at these poems, it became evident to me that many of the students had relied on the poetic devices we had already spoken about—rhyme, simile, metaphor, alliteration—to make meaning out of the words and images they had found. I couldn’t help but wonder whether their adeptness at this form had anything to do with the prevalence of short-form content, and more so, if putting bite-sized images and language together in a chosen order could teach a mind accustomed to fragmentation to make sense out of disparate images. In a digital age where social media is the epitome of fragmentation, I thought perhaps collage—and its intrinsic link to poetry—could be just the thing the next generation needs. If kids are bombarded with short-form content and there is no stopping it, maybe the antidote is to lean in: to flow with the way they are being trained to think rather than fight against it, to allow the currents of associative thinking to lead them back from a state of consumption to one of creation like riding out a riptide until you reach the place where it releases you and you can find your way back to shore. 

It is not lost on me now that Tristan Tzara’s method could be compared by some proponents of modern technology to the way an LLM operates: broadly speaking, taking the language of others and spitting it out in a remix. Perhaps the outrage of the Dadaists in the early 20th century at Tzara’s proposed method can be seen as parallel to the outrage we feel at artificial intelligence generating mashups of our own collective thought, creating work that is sometimes indiscernible from the real thing, even imitating poetry and art. Perhaps there’s an argument to be made that both outrages are born of a sense of futility in the face of advancement. 

An LLM works by training itself on vast amounts of textual information; after that, text is broken down into smaller units called tokens, which are words or parts of words. By repeatedly predicting the most probable next token, the LLM constructs coherent sentences and paragraphs. One essential property of AI is called self-attention: a mechanism that helps it decide which words matter most relative to each other. This self-attention, when interpreted poetically, sounds awfully similar to the method of Tristan Tzara. The difference, of course, is that the creative process is truly transformative for human beings: without that transformation, there is no real art. When kids create collage poems, they make connections they otherwise wouldn’t and, in doing so, recognize their own ability to organize and express their inner worlds in ways that are not only coherent to themselves but also appreciable by others; they come to understand the value of process, which in turn prepares them to choose creative effort over frictionless ease in an era where the latter is not only accessible but also coercively offered, without a care for the long-term consequences. While an LLM will simply generate a reshuffled map of the original material, a young poet will create a real map for themselves and others to follow, using the textual, tactile material in front of them to think new thoughts, come to know themselves and their place in the world, and connect with others on the basis of a new sense of direction.

Creative process is truly transformative for human beings: without that transformation, there is no real art.

In January, after the holidays, I decided to show the kids Sarah Sloat’s Hotel Almighty and Tom Phillips’ A Humument—both book-length erasure poems, both projects the authors happened upon by chance. I wanted them to see how text and images could harmonize in ways that were unexpected, how an individual perspective could be made tangible through a poet’s use of visual media and art materials. Phillips, himself a multidisciplinary artist, had spent his entire life working on a cheap copy of W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document he had found in a secondhand bookshop, treating the pages as a palimpsest, a record of his ever-evolving consciousness. He had created many versions of this book, which spoke to the fact that we are not only different from each other, but also different versions of ourselves at different times: the way we see the world is always changing, which is reflected in the choices we make. Likewise, Sarah Sloat had transformed the pages of Stephen King’s Misery, obscuring most of the original text with visual art and transforming themes of captivity into playful, buoyant poems through her application of mixed media. Though we wouldn’t touch upon the original source material, it was still a clear testament to poetry’s power to reshape the most impossible of circumstances. 

For the writing exercise this time, ahead of class I cut up a vintage book of translated Russian poetry, a book I liked as an aesthetic object but disliked as a work of translation—it felt good to go to town on that book with my X-Acto knife. 

When it came time for class, I was glad to offer up this material to my students: the accidental, chance phrasings resulting from botched translations happened to be excellent source material for found poetry. I had also predicted correctly that the kids would be excited to desecrate the pages of a real book, an act that is normally forbidden. When I passed out the pages, the room fell silent as a library. Immediately, the kids began scanning the poems for language that they wanted to use for their poems. 

The original poems, of course, were challenging, but that was the point: permission to transgress gave way to curiosity. At once, the kids began asking questions about words they didn’t know, trying to make sense of the enchanting new language, the unapproachable slowly transforming into a mystery that invited them in. For some, the process turned out to be an exercise in imitation, like painting copies of master works: students selected and meditated on lines they found beautiful, connecting with them deeply, their attention made manifest through the watercolor pencils and collage clippings they used to cover up the words they deemed less important. Others made new meaning from the source material, using the tools they had at their disposal to link together words and phrases. In any case, the tactile exercise taught them that poetry is not inaccessible, that any language can be made their own. 

I left that class with a new series of questions. Is destruction necessary for ownership? Is ownership itself destructive? Or is destruction a necessary step in the creation of something new? Though I have always felt pleasure when writing in physical books as the kids did that day, I have always been embarrassed when I see my own words on the page. I know that I want to teach the kids the opposite of that feeling: that their contribution is inherently valuable, even their marginalia. Writing is always done in conversation with the writing that came before it, and my hope is to let them into that conversation early: by allowing students to physically engage with challenging literature in a way that would normally be forbidden, I hope that they come away with a visceral understanding that poetry is not something out of their reach. 

Anyone who has scrolled through short-form content on social media knows that uneasy sense of looking for something and not being able to find it. Perhaps we should be equipping kids with a way to channel this urge into a poetry-making process: to experience the satisfaction of discovering resonances between words and images and the joy of finding previously unseen connections, to learn to search for and find what they’re looking for in the very process of searching and finding, to ask important questions about the difference between celebration and appropriation, and to understand how to honor those who came before us without being afraid to speak in a language that belongs to us all. 

Featured photo by Heather Green on Unsplash.