Cut-ups and Zines

Stefanie Petrik's workshop introduced us to new techniques for creating and publishing our work. (New to us, that is.)

Cut-ups

This technique is based on the work of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, authors of The Third Mind. They quote Naoleon Hill's book Think and Grow Rich, as saying that when you put two minds together there is always a third mind: a third and superior mind as an unseen collaborator.

I did know a little about cut-ups, but had imagined them to consist of sentences and paragraphs chopped up into individual words or phrases and then rearranged at random. Stefanie confirmed that was one of many options; but the way that she showed us was to take one of our poems and an article from the daily paper, and tear them into long strips, then put the strips together so as to form new lines across the page. She did pay some attention to the new meaning thus created. However when I emailed her a couple of weeks later to say I'd been playing with cut-ups, she asked me if reality had started to rewrite itself yet!

She also showed us permutation poems, a closely related technique invented by the same writers, in which 'the poem takes a simple sentence and forces every available meaning to be gleaned from different arrangements of words.' e.g. the phrase 'NO POETS DON'T OWN WORDS' going through a whole page full of permutations to get to 'DON'T (K)NO(W) WORDS OWN POETS'.

She explained that these methods stemmed from visual art techniques such as collage, and were also transferred to audio recordings and used by musicians such as David Bowie and Brian Eno, who 'both used cutting and splicing techniques that formed new, unconscious thematic links between works, words, and compositions.'

Zines

I would describe a zine as the magazine version of a chapbook – or perhaps I mean the chapbook version of a magazine. In other words, it's put together by hand. Wikipedia describes it as 'most commonly a small circulation, non-commercial publication of original or appropriated texts and images. More broadly, the term encompasses any self-published work of minority interest.'

Stefanie told us that zines were common during the punk era, the idea being that self-publishing is a way of becoming independent of the mainstream media.

She showed us how to create them in A5 size, by photocopying. Because it was not long after Sorry Day, which was still much in our minds, we all wrote short pieces on the theme of 'sorry' (not necessarily Sorry Day as such) and used them, in their handwritten form, as our content. We cut and pasted them on to folded A4 pages. (It is also possible to create printed versions on computer with a desktop publishing program.) We stapled them in the middle with a long stapler. We used our cut-ups on the cover, and the word 'sorry' handwritten with a pink pen.

We've decided to produce a zine a month!

Here are two places to find online instructions on making zines:
Action Girl Online
DIY 8 Page Pocket Zine





- Rosemary (Facilitator)