Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

Activity 12.1
Unit 12 Juxtaposition
Section 3 Attributing meaning

1 Cut-up poems are made by juxtaposing elements drawn from two or more pre-existing texts in order to create effects of tension or incongruity. Below are two extracts from the beginning and end of Adrian Henri’s ’On the Late Late Massachers Stillbirths and Deformed Children a Smoother Lovelier Skin Job’, which is presented as a ’Cut-up of John Milton Sonnet XVIII On the late Massacher in Piedmont/TV Times/CND leaflet’ (’CND’ stands for ’Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’).

The seven-day beauty plan:

Avenge O Lord thy slaughter’d saints, whose bones

Will cause up to 1 million deaths from leukaemia

Forget not, in thy book record their groans

Now for the vitally important step. Cream your face and neck a second time

No American president world-famous for beauty creams responsible for the freedom and safety of so many young offenders TODAY’S MEN OF ACTION

The Triple Tyrant Macmillan Kennedy Watkinson

The West governments are satisfied as to the moral necessity to resume Racing from Newmarket

...

This baby’s eyes and nose had merged into

one misshapen feature in the middle of its

forehead, lost 6" from Hips

sufferers can now wear fashion stockings

Early may fly the Babylonian woe

followed by

TOMORROW’S WEATHER

The Epilogue

close down.

1.1 Relying on features of language and style, try to identify the source of each phrase or line (i.e. whether it is from Milton’s sonnet, the TV Times or the CND leaflet).

1.2 Pick out three examples of juxtaposition and try to describe the effect of each one.

1.3 What is the overall effect of the use of juxtaposition in this poem?

2 Construct a cut-up poem of your own by (a) selecting two short texts (one of which should be a poem), (b) cutting them up into fragments, and (c) weaving them together in order to achieve irony, humour, surprise, enigma or effects that are similar to Henri’s poem.

For the best results do not use two texts of the same type (two poems, or two adverts, etc.). The reason for choosing a poem as one of your source texts is to help establish a semblance of poetic form in your cutup poem, but the other text needs to be significantly different in order to create effects of tension and incongruency. Use the same wording as the original texts but you need not use the whole of each text nor follow the original order.

When you have finished your cut-up poem, try to answer the following questions:

2.1 What guided your choice of texts?

2.2 How did you decide where to divide them up into into fragments?

2.3 What principles guided your attempt to reconstitute them as a cutup poem (e.g. Why did you use the material you included? Why did you not use other material? Why did you juxtapose the material in the way you did?).

2.4 What kind of overall effect do you think you’ve achieved?

Reading

Burgin, V. (1976) ’Art, Common Sense and Photography’, in S. Hall and J. Evans (eds) (1999) Visual Culture: The Reader, London: Sage/Open University, pp. 41-50.

Eisenstein, S. (1979a) ’The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram’, in G. Mast and M. Cohen (eds) Film Theory and Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 85-100.

Eisenstein, S. (1979b) ’A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’, in G. Mast and M. Cohen (eds) Film Theory and Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 101-22.

Eliot, T.S. (1922) The Waste Land, in T.S. Eliot (2005) Complete Poems and Plays, London: Faber & Faber.

Shklovsky, V. (1917) ’Art as Technique’, in D. Lodge (ed.) (1988) Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, London: Longman, pp. 16-30.