I don't subscribe to the Wall St. Journal, but one of the mailing lists I'm on (for the Science Fiction Poetry Association) is discussing an article that appeared in a recent edition about a high school teacher who clips out articles from the business pages and has students compose love poems based on words they pull out, using the given headline as their title. I think this is a great idea!

Revisionism like this is a great way to shake us out of our habitual ways of writing and testing something new. When I wrote the poems in one of my chapbooks, Paratabloids (now out of print, but the ebook is also available), I appropriated headlines from the Weekly World News and wrote poems based on the characters in the stories (or invented stories to match the headlines). So I can understand the form of inquiry that one engages in when retooling a business news story through poetic technique. The novelty of the exercise itself says something about the business world, and how rare it is to see poetry about business, or news stories about love, in the trade. I would imagine it humanizes the industry for the students, and gives them a sense of ownership over a discourse that -- for high school students, especially -- is relatively alienating and full of the jargon of economics. Indeed, as one corporate site on Poetry & Business puts it, "Poetry, for sure, is the best way we've got of banishing euphemism and the world of words without meaning."

When I teach poetry, I often have students use similar "cut up" techniques to generate ideas and experimental forms -- a practice famously advocated by beat poet, William Burroughs. They usually relish the power and violence of wielding the scissors. I use a "perforated poetry" exercise from Robin Behn's useful book, The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach, that requires taking a given poem and leaving out many words and phrases and asking students to fill them in with their own ideas. (The poem from Behn's book is "Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies" by Edna St. Vincent Millay...I've used it, as well as others). I also like to have students cut up lines from the school paper, magazines, and even their own early drafts and rearrange them as poetry, sometimes swapping their favorite clippings in round robin fashion collaboratively. But something about subversively using the Wall St. Journal -- and perhaps other business and entrepreneurial magazines -- really appeals to me. Heck, there are all sorts of lifeless documents (like contracts, real estate listings, and so forth) that I could have them retool and reinject "life" into. I'm definitely going to try this in the future. Maybe I'll even pull a Dead Poet's Society routine, and have 'em cut up (preselected) pages from the class textbook!

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