Folding the Poem: Applying Pavel Kushnir’s Method to Poetic Practice

Pavel Kushnir’s fold-in method offers poets more than a technique for rearranging found language. It proposes a different conception of what a poem is and how poetic meaning is produced. In conventional composition, the poet often moves from one image, statement, or emotional condition to another through association, metaphor, narrative, or logical transition. Kushnir’s method replaces this movement with folding. Instead of traveling between distant linguistic points, the poet alters the field so that the points suddenly touch.

When applied to poetry, the fold-in method brings unrelated or incompatible registers into direct contact: a government form may enter a love poem, a recipe may complete a sentence about imprisonment, a dictionary may collapse into invented language, or an intimate confession may emerge from the middle of an agricultural instruction. The sources do not merely alternate. Their syntax, verbs, metaphors, and moral implications pass into one another.

The resulting poem is not a collage in which separate fragments remain visibly intact. It is a contaminated structure. Each language begins to behave as though it belongs to the others. A bureaucratic verb becomes intimate. A household instruction becomes political. A term from animal husbandry begins to describe human administration. A broken sentence continues inside an unrelated document. The poem creates meaning by altering proximity.