Found Poetry Collages by Mary Bast: Toward the River

Thursday, August 11, 2022

Toward the River

During National Poetry Month, April 2013, I wrote a found poem a day from Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Cunningham's The Hours, available in Toward the River: Found Poems.

Fifteen pantoums capture the dramatic arc of Cunningham's four main characters in several poems each. The remaining fifteen poems are erasures that playfully depart from the novel.

The title poem, "toward the river" is drawn from Cunningham's remake of Virginia Woolf's death:

a coat too heavy
seems like nothing
she does not travel far
the voices are back

seems like nothing
searching for a stone
the voices are back
merely a gifted eccentric

searching for a stone
headache is approaching
merely a gifted eccentric
under a darkening sky

headache is approaching
dreaming of the surface
under a darkening sky
into one of the pockets

dreaming of the surface
the current wraps itself
into one of the pockets
they won’t let her go

the current wraps itself
stripes of green-black weed
they won’t let her go
moment of true perception

stripes of green-black weed
she does not travel far
moment of true perception
a coat too heavy

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About Me

Former Editor at Bacopa Literary Review, I write poetry, found poetry, and memoir. When my hands aren't on computer keys they're creating art.

The Found Poetry Review's 2015 PoMoSco (Poetry Month Scouts) project especially intrigued me -- the chance to experiment with a variety of found poetry structures.

Those exercises also enhanced my under-standing of poetry and writing in general. For example, the "First in Line" badge required creating a poem from first lines in one poet's collection.

My resulting poem, "The Days Have Done With You" (from Nina Bogin's collection In the North) made me much more aware of the way a poem's first line can either set up what's going to happen or drop us right into action, much the same as the start of a good novel.

Some Forms of Found Poetry

Found poetry is created by taking words or phrases from other sources and changing spacing and lines, adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. Any poetic form can be used with found poetry.

There's also the cento—made up of lines from other poems. The sources may be poems of a single poet, or many poets, or even many different languages.

Erasure poems eliminate everything from a page or pages except the words that make up the poem. The "erasure" may be accomplished by white-out, correction tape (of various colors), lightening a photo and writing the poem's words over the original text, and many other variations.

Called blackout poems when covered with black tape (often refers to newspaper articles blacked out except for the words of the poem).

Ekphrasis usually refers to poetry inspired by visual art; I've extended the term to include art inspired by poetry.

Illustrated poetry describes poems and art side by side.

Haiga traditionally incorporated an ink-brush or watercolor painting, a haiku poem, and calligraphy. Modern poets stretch these boundaries, superimposing haiku on photos, for example.