Phrases that assemble themselves — from borrowed fragments, like a conversation overheard in a dream.
click the scissors to paste together the first phrase
Categories
on cut-up poetry
In 1920, Tristan Tzara proposed a recipe for making a Dadaist poem: take a newspaper article, cut out each word with scissors, shake them together in a bag, and pull them out one by one in whatever order chance provides.
The resulting sentence belongs to no one and everyone — its logic comes from chance rather than intention, closer to how thought actually drifts than to how we edit it into sense.
This page borrows that same gesture: fixed grammatical slots filled by fragments pulled at random, assembled by a click rather than a hand in a hat.
