by Matthew Hittinger
Matthew Hittinger Gives Us the Mash-Up
“My favorite result is the tension of having two voices speaking back and forth to each other.”
If you listen to dance music you know all about the mash-up: two or more songs thrown together by a DJ, sometimes taking the vocal track of one song and throwing it over the rhythm of another. In the cleverest of mash-ups, a DJ will take songs that somehow relate to each other lyrically and blend them together, sometimes in amusing ways, sometimes in fierce ways, sometimes in poignant ways (see DJ Earworm’s work, or on Madonna’s recent tour how she mashed her hit “Rain” with the Eurythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again”).
I’ve found in my own work, when I have two or three poem drafts that seem to be speaking to each other but none of which seem to be able to stand on their own as a fully formed poem yet, that “mashing them up” often creates surprising results. My favorite result is the tension of having two voices speaking back and forth to each other, which I sometimes indicate through italics or by giving the “mashed-in” poem its own spatial logic on the page.
So here’s an exercise for you: Take two poems that you’re not totally satisfied with and try mashing them together. That might mean alternating lines from one with the other, italicizing the one and having it break in throughout the course of the other so that it appears as if two voices are speaking, or simply taking your favorite lines from each and recombining them in ways that might startle you into an altogether new poem.
I have included a couple of examples of my own poems that use this technique. The first is a mashed-up poem titled “Skin Game,” and the second is one titled “The Alchemists Dissolve and Coagulate.”
The first example is a true mash-up, in which I took two poems and put them together to create the resulting, third piece (examples linked as PDFs). The two poems I mashed were “Skin Game” and “Skin Shift.” The final product can be seen here.
The second example, “The Alchemists Dissolve and Coagulate,” is not so much a mash-up of two poems but a mash-up of two different types of language: the poem’s story on one side and this juxtaposed list of a different kind of language that gives some sonic and semantic texture. The poem on the left-hand side came first and it always seemed to be asking for more. So I did some research and found these words really beautiful and wanted to somehow weave them in.
“Skin Game” and “The Alchemists Dissolve and Coagulate” are two distinct approaches to the prompt — the first mashing two drafts together and the second mashing a draft with found language. There are many other ways to approach this prompt as well.
Good luck with your pieces, and mash away!
Matthew Hittinger is the author of the chapbooks Pear Slip, winner of the 2006 Spire Press Chapbook Award, Narcissus Resists (GOSS183/MiPOesias, 2009) and Platos de Sal (Seven Kitchens Press, 2009). Shortlisted for the National Poetry Series, the New Issues Poetry Prize, the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, and twice for the Walt Whitman Award, Hittinger’s honors include a Hopwood Award and The Helen S. and John Wagner Prize from the University of Michigan, the Kay Deeter Award from the journal Fine Madness, and three Pushcart nominations. His work has appeared in many journals, on Verse Daily and in the anthology Best New Poets 2005. Matthew lives and works in New York City.
All poems included in this post are unpublished and shared with permission from the author. Contact Matthew Hittinger before using or reproducing the poems shared in this post.
This prompt is really exciting, Matthew. I love the examples from your own work, and I can’t wait to try my hand at mashing up two of my poems.
(And thank you, Andre, for fixing the formatting issues that kept this post from being published on time!)
Andre Tan replied:
October 2nd, 2009 at 2:41 pm
(oh, pshaw…
)
oh, yeah!
nice prompt.
Geeeeeeeesh..this could be soooo hard..or so easy…or something SmashED from the outer limits of my step mothers brain….who ran of with my dads fortune
I have a few poems I’d like to mash up.
And yes, thank you Andre!
Brilliant prompt. I likely won’t be around next week, but I do plan to try this at the earliest opportunity. Thanks for the idea.
Oh, I have an idea! For a collaborative take, why not mash your poem up with a poem from another member?
angie werren replied:
October 3rd, 2009 at 7:06 am
member mash…
is that anything like the monster mash?
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
October 3rd, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Way better.
Dave Bonta replied:
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Sounds dirty.
barbara_y replied:
October 3rd, 2009 at 1:36 pm
it was a graveyard smash
angie werren replied:
October 3rd, 2009 at 3:45 pm
it caught in a flash
angie werren replied:
October 3rd, 2009 at 3:46 pm
well…”ON in a”
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
October 3rd, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Depends on how you do it.
rallentanda replied:
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:39 pm
I’m doing it with food
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
October 4th, 2009 at 1:28 am
Now, *that* sounds dirty. There are books about this — how to make vegetables and fruits into sex toys. I am just saying.
rallentanda replied:
October 4th, 2009 at 2:30 am
My mother said I’m not to play with you anymore!
OK, I’ve had a go – what do I do with it ? Is it a case of waiting until a new thread is posted ?
Nathan replied:
October 3rd, 2009 at 7:27 am
You post a link to it Thursday in the comments section of the “Get Your Poem On” post. There’s more information here: http://readwritepoem.org/about/about-our-weekly-prompts/
wordsculptor replied:
October 3rd, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Thanks – I thought that was the case. All I’ve got to do now is REMEMBER to do it !
Joseph Harker replied:
October 3rd, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Easy enough if you check the RWP home page every day obsessively… ^_^
rallentanda replied:
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:03 am
While your at it some of you might like to whip up a Shakespearean sonnet and submit it on the New Formalism site.What the heck it’s only 14 lines and the format is supplied.
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Oh, easy peasy, Rallentanda.
[...] read write prompt #95: the poetics of the mash-up, by celebrity poet matthew hittinger If you listen to dance music you know all about the mash-up: two or more songs thrown together by a DJ, sometimes taking the vocal track of one song and throwing it over the rhythm of another. In the cleverest of mash-ups, a DJ will take songs that somehow relate to each other lyrically and blend them together, sometimes in amusing ways, sometimes in fierce ways, sometimes in poignant ways [...]
I was, at first, sort of lost by the prompt. Mashing two poems, I thought – how on Earth will I choose?
I decided to glean by date.
For whatever reason, September 7 2008 and September 7, 2009. It is uncanny how well they fit, even in their mashdom.
LOVE the makings from this prompt, once I let go of my worry about doing it right….
Is it weird that I actually sort of did this before I read the prompt?
ahah. (:
Thanks Mathew I’m feeling totally inspired, and that was before I read about member mash and vegetables lol. I am interested in creative commons and the copyright debates that swirl about audio and visual mash up construction. I’m wondering if similiar issues have emerged for poetry-mashup artists. How is copyright interpreted and/or manipulated ? Is there a word count, or extract, that can be applied for the use of another persons work that can be
included in a Poetry mashup.
Any chance we have a member dabbling in copyright law knowledge
Sharon, this is a great question. Let me try to find the answer because it seems less clear-cut in a mash-up, especially depending on how much you alter the original text, than in other areas of using another poet’s work.
This is interesting. And a bit disturbing. Reading the result of my mash is like reading something someone else wrote, even though every word was my own.
[...] by Mallery This is a mash-up of two poems (mostly one, a few lines of the other). Prompted by Read Write Poem’s Celebrity Poet Matthew Hittinger, the idea was to take two poems that weren’t standing their own and mash them together in an [...]
[...] survived four hours being cut When I die with myself . . . Written in response to Read Write Prompt 95, using elements of Memento and Sulaymaniyah. Spread the [...]
I love this one. Thanks!