I'm a big fan of collage in the visual arts. I love the pioneering work by Picasso and Georges Braque, where they pasted pieces of wallpaper and newspaper onto their canvases. I love the anti-Nazi photomontages by the German artist John Heartfield that he did in the 1920s and 30s. And I love Robert Rauschenberg's combinations of everything from stuffed angora goats to news photographs.

But as a reader, I've always been a little skeptical of literary collage. When it comes to writing, I guess, I'm more of a conservative.

The late novelist William Burroughs is the literary collagist. I discovered him when I was a would-be teenaged bohemian. And I wanted to like him. Burroughs called his collage method the "cut-up technique" -- he would literally cut up pages of other people's writing, together with pages of his own, and rearrange it all semi-randomly into a semi-meaningful patchwork.

But Burroughs' cut-up technique bugged me…because it was all about randomness and non-sequiturs instead of logic and narrative craft. It seemed too easy. It seemed pretentious… like when Burroughs himself suggested that the technique could predict the future.

So why have I been thinking about William Burroughs for the first time in 25 years? Because with my current intense appetite for news, I've been reading the New York Times more and more thoroughly, and more and more online.

And one morning it struck me that in its online form, with all the headlines displayed together on a single web page, something resembling poetry is being spontaneously generated, day after day.

I dug out an old interview of Burroughs, in which he said, "You can select and edit, once you have made your cut-up. There's no necessity of using it all. Cut-ups simply make explicit a process that goes on all the time. When you walk down the street, that's a cut-up -- because your stream of consciousness is constantly being cut by random events."

Weird. William Burroughs was suddenly making a lot of sense to me. Maybe it's because I'm now in my mid-40s, the age William Burroughs was when he was into his cutup experiments. But, in any event, indulge me, and see if you don't think what I'm about to read isn't a half-way-decent poem.

Every line is a headline from the Sunday New York Times, rearranged and punctuated, but otherwise unedited…including the title, which is:

Salient Facts: Chilling Effect

Angels in an artist's house -- elegiac German novelist is dead
at 57, where Churchill waged War, underground, Alan Dugan's
poetry for grown-ups.
The Atlanta Symphony gets a jolt of energy, charity of relative
newcomers rivals gifts to Atlanta from old-timers --
at 63, Ted Turner may yet roar again.

Attack on Tora Bora slow but steady, U.S. commander says…
-- Giants still breathing after rally.
U.S. says it heard bin Laden near Tora Bora…
-- America's friend, Uzbekistan
U.S. believes it has recorded radio messages from bin Laden…
…TV's, DVD's: all yours, but first
do the math.

Navy missile defense plan Is canceled by the Pentagon, a tempest
over a teaspoon of a bird.
No burning Bush: this time, dissent stops at the White House door.
500 officers to be issued high-powered weapons used by elite unit, Steep rise
in gun sales reflects post-attack fears.

Equal opportunity recession: almost everyone is feeling it,
buyers reading cover price, and opting not to read the rest,
government fiddles and the economy burns

Pain, the disease.
Mix-up of remains from crash causes family more pain,
Victims' families find no salve in holiday.

It's a melancholy poem to finish this melancholy year.

I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.