Born in St. Louis, Missouri, William S. Burroughs was a major figure of the Beat Generation. He is known primarily for his controversial novel Naked Lunch (1959)—the subject of a US obscenity trial—and for his use of the cut-up technique, developed by his friend, British-born artist Brion Gysin. The technique involves cutting up and reassembling text or film in random order to produce non-linear anti-narratives; influences include Dadaist collage procedures and T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land." Using this technique, Burroughs collaborated with Gysin and filmmaker Anthony Balch to produce short experimental films, including Towers Open Fire (1963), The Cut Ups (1967), and Bill and Tony (1972). The films juxtapose and overlay documentary footage of Burroughs and others with stock footage, as well as surreal, pornographic, and science-fiction imagery. Burroughs also narrated portions of the films, in part using text appropriated from Scientology manuals and film scripts—notably Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932). Fragments from The Soft Machine (1961), part of the science-fiction Nova Trilogy, appear in the narration of Towers Open Fire. Burroughs also appeared in numerous feature films.

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In the last two decades, African American poets working in innovative and avant-garde forms have produced poetry focused upon the theme of racial objectification. Individual and collaborative projects by Dawn Lundy Martin, Duriel E. Harris, and Ronaldo V. Wilson, who write and perform together as the Black Took Collective, practice what this article calls a poetics of thingification: a poetry that draws attention to language's capacity for reification in general and for racial objectification in particular. Drawing upon thing theory and recent scholarship on race and avant-garde poetry, this article focuses on Dawn Lundy Martin's poetics in order to demonstrate how poets combine innovative techniques with racial stereotypes to scrutinize hegemonic expectations at the level of poetic form, especially within the tradition of African American poetry. Rather than adopting the humanizing rhetoric and lyrical modes of conventional African American poetry, these poets use the trope of the objectified Black body to deconstruct linguistic processes of racial reification from within.