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Destruction is an Act of Creation

the process of making quasi-found poetry

By Clint JonesPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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Destruction is an Act of Creation
Photo by Manolo Chrétien on Unsplash

The world has a way of grinding you down. Or it does me. Commitments to other people and projects, work, writing, life in general, all have a way of getting out of balance, turning easy tasks into obstacles, making mountains out of molehills, and generally sullying an otherwise pleasant day or disposition. Not that finding a perfect harmony between commitments is possible, I am not even sure it’s desirable, really, when the hectic-ness of life is what makes taking a break from it so satisfying. Or, again, at least that is true for me. I suspect I am not alone in this, however.

I work with words; I sell books, I review books, I edit books, I write books, essays, stories, and poetry. My life revolves around words. I love them and I have for as long as I can remember. I love the strength of a word, the way it feels in the mouth, or the way it looks on a page. I appreciate the way a well-written sentence or line of poetry comes together in a powerful moment of creativity. I love how playful words can be at teasing out meaning or delivering nuance and understanding. I cannot think of anything more satisfying than a good book. I love these things and more about words, though I must admit, I am not the best at making these things happen. I confess to being mediocre.

My mediocrity, however, has little effect on my meteoric hopes for the words I use in my daily life. I strive to deliver the best, my best, when working with words. But sometimes you just need a break. The funny thing, though, is that for me, taking a break from words just means being more playful with words, abandoning rules and expectations, and allowing myself to be at the mercy of other word users. Let me explain.

My inner peace, what really allows me to recalibrate, is taking a handful of old magazines and cutting them to pieces to salvage particular words. I love the fonts, the crazy way they are displayed in eye-catching arrays, the colors, and most importantly, the variety of words. I use a couple of different cutting tools to extract the words from their pages: crafting scissors, regular scissors, exacto knife, and sometimes just my hands for tearing and shredding. I don’t just liberate words, though, I also take pictures and parts of pictures, graphics, and samples of different textures of paper. It can take hours to do this even with a small pile of magazines. One of the constant problems is deciding what to cut especially when there are things on both sides of a sheet of paper that you want to save.

The process is methodical, whimsical, and best of all, destructive. I get to hack, cut, tear, rip, crumple, and essentially destroy a physical object. It’s very cathartic. But not without purpose. Once I have gone through the magazines, it helps to have a variety of topics so you get a good variance of words, styles, pictures, and paper, I use the salvaged words and other bits to create what I call quasi-found poetry. I arrange the words, sometimes using a picture in place of word, into one, but more often several, arrays of poetry and see what words I am missing. If they are words I might find by going through the discard pile—an, the, of, those types of words—I dive back in. If they are words I might need another magazine (or newspaper) to locate I grab another if I have one handy but sometimes I’ll just plan to write it in with a sharpie or watercolors or build it in with lettered beads.

Once I have everything arranged, I glue them to other bits of paper—this can also be a fun project. It’s easy to use construction paper, or even a cheap canvas, but I like to tape or glue the debris of the magazines together in a chaotic and incoherent background. Using big blocks of color and type face to form the background, I sometimes work in a piece of blackout poetry in the background as an Easter egg, I then attach the words and pictures as I have arranged them.

It is an artistic process with no rules, it is a fun way to upcycle magazines and newspapers and really any paper products with cool fonts or interesting words—I once used a menu from my favorite Chinese take-out spot. The words and pictures I don’t use I save in a big, old, cracker tin I found at a yard sale. I save them as a draw pile for when I’m stumped or in need of a cool looking word. The end products can be used as fun gifts, you can save them in a notebook, or hang them on your wall as groovy conversation pieces that change as often as you clip and cut your way through your magazines and paper products. Or you can trash them—no harm, no foul. As I said, there are no rules but having fun—you can take this as seriously as you like. This is the most fun way I have found to experience the joy of words.

art
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About the Creator

Clint Jones

I am a philosopher slowly transitioning into a writer. I write mostly essays, non-fiction, and poetry but I am now adding fiction to my repertoire with asperations of penning a novel. Thanks for reading my work. Tips are appreciated.

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Nice work

Very well written. Keep up the good work!

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  1. Easy to read and follow

    Well-structured & engaging content

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  • Ricardo de Moura Pereira7 months ago

    Very good

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