I get that question a lot. In the process of up-cycling old books into new journals, I cut out the existing pages so I can use the cover. This means that I am often surrounded by book guts.
My favorite thing, above all, to do with the unused pages is to make blackout poetry.
What's blackout poetry? It's a form of collaborative poem writing; you take a page that already has text on it (a magazine, a newspaper, an old book, a brochure) and you use a black marker to darken the text that you don't want. The words you leave unmarked become your poem. This allows for some strange, funny, and often very evocative poems.
Blackout poetry is a meditative process that doesn't require too much brain juice on my part. The language is already there; you just get to emphasize the words differently.
One thing I appreciate about doing this is the way it makes me look for parts of speech. Often, when you're trying to craft a new kind of meaning out of the words that are already in a sentence, you look for nouns that could double as verbs, or ambiguous clauses.
In this poem to the left
<-------- I had fun playing with the author's repeated use of words. Blacking out the text in between made this more of a rhythmic incantation than a sub-par evangelical text.
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