Dada

In one of my classes, we had to "write" a Dada poem. Here are the instructions to create a Dada poem (according to Tristan Tzara's method):

1. Take a newspaper and a pair of scissors
2. Choose an article the length you want your poem to be
3. Cut out the article
4. Carefully cut out each individual word and put them in a bag
5. Gently shake the bag
6. Take out word by word and copy down on paper, in the order they come out
7. The poem is finished when the bag is empty

Undoubtedly, if you follow this, you will end up with a lot of nonsense, but some of the phrases that come up, can give you some wonderful imagery ideas and I found it was a very good place to grab inspiration. Some of the phrases that I really liked from mine were 'testing dangerous judge of Justice' and 'handcuffs comment controlled control'.

I found that a plastic cup worked better than a bag. For mine, I used every time that a comma came up as a line break and every period as a stanza break. Also, you might want to either not include hyphenated words or write the whole word on one piece of paper, so that the poem makes a little more sense in the end and at least every word is a real word.