Where magnetic poetry comes from: hats, scissors and fridge doors
The little word tiles on the fridge belong to a long, slightly anarchic tradition: writing with words you did not choose. Here is how that idea travelled, and why it still works.
1920: a poem out of a hat
The clearest ancestor is a set of instructions published by the Romanian-French poet Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of Dada, in his 1920 "Manifesto on feeble love and bitter love". Under the heading "To make a Dadaist poem", he tells the reader to take a newspaper, cut out an article, cut out each of its words, shake them in a bag and copy them down in the order they come out. The poem, he adds with a straight face, will resemble you.
Tzara's recipe was a provocation as much as a method. Dada set out to mock the idea of the inspired artist, and a poem made by chance from a newspaper was a neat way to do it. But the instructions also contain a real observation that later writers would build on: when you remove the writer's choice of words, the results are not simply noise. Readers find patterns, jokes and odd beauty in them, and the person arranging the fragments still makes choices.
The 1920s: the exquisite corpse
A few years later the Surrealists in Paris turned chance into a parlour game. In the game they called cadavre exquis, "exquisite corpse", each player writes a word or phrase in a fixed slot of a sentence (adjective, noun, verb and so on), folds the paper to hide it and passes it on. The name comes from one of the first sentences the game produced, usually quoted as "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau": the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine. The same folded-paper method was soon used for drawings, with each person adding a section of a figure. Wikipedia's article on the exquisite corpse traces the game and its drawn variant.
The exquisite corpse adds something Tzara's hat lacked: grammar. Because each slot has a part of speech, the result is a valid sentence, and that structure is what makes the surprise readable. Magnetic poetry works the same way. A pile of nouns alone is a list; a pile with verbs, adjectives and small words such as the, of and under is a sentence waiting to happen.
1959: the cut-up
The method was rediscovered in Paris at the end of the 1950s by the painter and writer Brion Gysin, who, by his own account, noticed while slicing through layers of newspaper that the strips lined up into new sentences. He and William S. Burroughs developed this into the "cut-up technique": cut a page of text into pieces, rearrange them, and read what emerges. They published experiments in the 1960 collection Minutes to Go, and Burroughs used cut-ups in novels such as The Soft Machine. Burroughs argued that the method could expose hidden meanings in ordinary text; whether or not one accepts that, it became a well-known writing tool, later borrowed by songwriters as well as novelists.
The cut-up made one practical change that matters for anyone using word tiles today: the writer is no longer a passive copier of whatever comes out of the hat. Cutting is random; arranging is deliberate. That balance between accident and choice is exactly what a magnetic poetry board offers.
1993: the fridge kit
The commercial product most people know started in Minneapolis. According to the company's own history and contemporary press coverage summarized in Wikipedia's article on Magnetic Poetry, it was created in 1993 by Dave Kapell, a songwriter who had been writing words on scraps of paper to get past writer's block and then glued them onto magnets. Friends kept rearranging the words on his fridge, he began selling small kits at craft fairs, and the idea grew into a business with many themed word sets.
"Magnetic Poetry" is a trademark of that company, which is why the generic activity is often described as fridge poetry or word-magnet poetry. The board on this site is an independent, free toy built on the same simple idea, not a version of the commercial product.
Why it works
Writers keep returning to these methods for reasons that are more practical than mystical.
- It removes the blank page. A limited set of words is far less intimidating than the whole dictionary. You begin by noticing combinations rather than by trying to say something.
- It forces unusual pairings. Our habits of language are strong; we reach for the same adjective for the same noun. A random pile breaks those habits, which is why the results often feel fresh even to their author.
- It separates generating from judging. Shuffling tiles is play, and play keeps the internal critic quiet for long enough to produce something to work with.
- It is a constraint. The Oulipo group, founded in France in 1960, built an entire practice on the idea that rules make writers more inventive, not less; see our writing prompts for word tiles for constraints you can try on the board.
Using these methods in your own writing
You can put each stage of this history to work:
- Hat method. Deal a fresh set of tiles and copy the first ten in the order they appear. Underline the best pair and write a paragraph that uses it.
- Exquisite corpse. With a friend, take turns adding one tile at a time to a line, without discussion, until the line feels finished.
- Cut-up. Paste a paragraph of your own stuck draft into a text editor, break it into three-word chunks, shuffle them and read. Keep any phrase that surprises you.
- Fridge. Leave a poem half finished on the board and come back to it tomorrow. The tiles you did not use are often the ones that finish it.
None of this needs to produce a finished poem. Its value is in the jolt it gives to your ordinary way of putting words together, which you can then take back to the writing you actually need to do.