"With Hidden Noise": Wordlist Writing Prompt

Of the ways into poems, one way has reliably worked for me. A variant of the “cut-up” method, which I believe is traced to William S. Burroughs, it might be called negative erasures, or From Prose Chaos, or, after Duchamp, “With Hidden Noise.”
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Several years ago people would get hundreds of junk emails advertising Cialis and/or sup-prime mortgages. At first these emails were not filtered into junk at all. Later, the senders attempted to trick servers with odd typography and pasted-in wordlists.

That the lists rode along the ads for pharmaceuticals and loan sharks lent them a certain hilarious, and also potent, quality. Signals of someone casting about and copy-pasting abounded, e.g. tiny floating bits of news articles or HTML from the sender’s own email program.

Here’s one of the lists:

Writing prompt:

Check out Duchamp’s piece “With Hidden Noise.” Think of the prose chaos in the wordlist as a skein of words surrounding a hidden subject—a noise. Because it’s made of words, the skein is never quite the same. The hidden noises are therefore many, emerging with your noticing (and notice). 

Whether your poem is “noisy” per se is up to you. It seems to me that noise is contingent on the state of capture: release cancels it out.

Choose your blend of constraint + personal creative authority. Decide on adding connective words or whether to make changes according to the needs of the emerging poem. For example, if a word from the list proves to be not right, consider replacing it with a word that rhymes with it (another hidden noise).