Cut-up Process: Burroughs
Left: William Burroughs collaborating with Tom Veitch; example of a newspaper “cut up” of The Naked Express (1964/1965), used with permission of the online collection at Reality Studio. Burroughs described his method for finding poetry, with variations, was described in his essay, “The Cut Up Method”: “Take a page…Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 ... one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page.” Right: A poem Burroughs created using the Cut Up Method on an article from the Paris Herald Tribune, 1959, from his book with Brion Grysin, The Third Mind (New York: NY: Viking, 1978).