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What is the history of word magnets?

by Rezwan on 10/29 at 02:26 PM
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The idea is based on the ”cut-up technique” pioneered by surrealist poets such as William S. Burroughs, Tristan Tzara and Brion Gysin. They would cut up words from magazines, novels and newspapers, mix them up, and put them together at random. The point was to break free from the tyranny of expectation and encounter words fresh! New! Random and out of context.

Here are some fun, do it yourself cut-up links.

One day, a man who was into the cut-up technique cut up a bunch of words and tried to compose poems with them. But there was a big problem with this. He had allergies. Every time he got a good poem going, he would sneeze and all the words would go flying. Frustrated, he came up with the brilliant idea of sticking the words onto magnets, and that’s how Magnetic Poetry™ was born.

Since then, English speakers have been playing with dozens of variations of magnetic word kits. We here at ajabanzabAn were inspired to make Persian-English kits when we saw some Spanish-English kits.

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