I am a Free Verse Poet

And I occasionally write poetry in forms. I try to occasionally explain to others about those forms because there is no type of poetry that I don’t enjoy talking about.

Today I want to talk about Cut Poetry. I may end up doing this for each of the forms that I actually understand. (Cause sometimes I don’t understand the form rules)

If you want more examples of my poetry in the use of forms I have a couple of volumes already published and one in progress. Those are Xactly poetic and Ars Poetica, published. The current volume in progress is Lyrical Recycling, a volume of Entirely cut poetry. Xactly poetic is  just various forms because I wanted to prove to myself that I could. Ars Poetica is a volume based on the form it was named after.

Cut poetry is basically seeing beauty in what already exists. It is very best to describe it as upcycling words. Cut poetry is sometimes called found poetry.  There are a few types of Cut/Found poetry. Blackout poems are in this group. The type I prefer are slightly different. I prefer the list poem variety.

It requires you to pick sources for the words for your poem. For my volume I chose song lyrics. That gave me a huge variety of things to use to make the poem work. I have in the past used song titles, book titles, show titles. The thing is to really make Cut Poetry work you want to grab more than one word from each source. 

Here is the poem that I made with song titles. It was published in Xactly poetic originally.

(Song Titles)


You should be sad,
This is why,
I found
The devil in I
Hate me,
Heaven knows
I am
Still learning.


They said I was special...
Fragile Minds
Fuck it up.


Cover me in sunshine,
Joke's on you,
All good girls go to Hell...
Don't threaten me with a good time.


I can't decide
What about us,
When the party's over
Sometimes she forgets
Why
That's the way love goes.

Each line is from a different source.  Quite a few people question the legality of Cut Poetry because you are literally using other people’s words to create something new. As long as you properly attribute the poem you are not breaking copyright. My poem above attributes the source in the title.  However, not always is that as easy. With song lyrics I have to make sure I list the songs I used for each poetry.

Here is an example from Lyrical Recycling.

Rock Bottom 


(song titles are : 
Drunk (And I Don't Wanna Go Home)by Elle King and Miranda Lambert, bottle tells me so by Ashley Mcbryde, Hurt by Johnny Cash, Rock Bottom by Citizen Soldier, Now I'm in it by Haim 
*plus I add a line to make it work)



There's always time for jumping off the deep end
From the shape I'm in, I must have barely made it to the bed
If this ain't bottom, it's as far down as I ever wanna go
The party's over and as always, I'm the last one to know

Try to run but my demons follow
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real

Forget my whole existence 'cause everything's wrong
My breaking point, so far behind
I've been trying to find my way back for a minute
My limit's in the rearview, I've crossed every line
still running so I feel like nothing is left behind 

Note the attribution. That allows the reader to go to the original source and see how you have pulled from it.

I feel like this is one of the easier forms. I will likely be doing more of this but I don’t want to put it on a specific day as I do not see it as a long term blog series.