Project: Cut Paste Poetry

Cut paste poetry is a simple, fun poem-making activity that you can try anytime. You don’t need any fancy materials to get started. You just need the following:

- Stack of old magazines, brochures, and/or newspapers
- Scissors*
- Paste or Glue*
- Lots of Paper or a Notebook
- Dry Container like an envelope, a plastic tumbler,
etc. (optional)

Once you have these materials, you’re all set to start making cut paste poetry. Just follow these steps:

Collecting Words

Go through your magazines, brochures, and/or newspapers. Look for words that you like and then cut them per word. There’s no limit to how many words you could collect. Of course, the more words you have, the better because you’ll have more choices when you start making poems.

Don’t forget to collect nouns and verbs. These would be the most useful words in your word collection. You might also consider looking for adjectives and adverbs, conjunctions and interjections, prepositions, and pronouns. Once you’ve collected enough words, you can put them in a container or just a clear space on your work/play area.

Fun with Words

Now that you’ve got a good collection of words, you can start making your cut paste poetry.

You can do these in three ways:

1) Just randomly choose words in your collection and paste them one by one on the paper. It doesn’t matter if they don’t make sense. Sometimes, you’ll come up with phrases or sentences like: puppy sing very of the good. Don’t worry about it at first. Just have fun and continue choosing and pasting words until your paper is too full or you think that your ’silly poem’ is done. You can leave this cut paste poem as it is, or you can get a pen or pencil and add words that could help your ’silly poem’ find some sense.

2) Give yourself a number and stick to it. For example, you chose “12″. Once you have this number in mind, randomly choose 12 (or any number that you chose) words from your collection. After you picked your words, try to arrange them on your paper and make a poem. Again, it doesn’t matter if some phrases and/or sentences don’t make sense. You can leave this poem as it is or you can get a pen or pencil to add ‘necessary’ words.

3) Lay all your words on your work/play table. Read each one carefully and start choosing words to make phrases and/or sentences for your poems.

You can try more than one approach, if you like. This way, you can select which one is your favorite for future use.

Here are some examples of cut paste poetry: