Found Poetry Collages by Mary Bast: Unmuzzled, Unfettered

Thursday, April 6, 2023

Unmuzzled, Unfettered

My collection of found poems includes ekphrasic collages inspired by works of art from Shakespeare to Charlie Mingus, centos of famous poets from Maxine Kumin to Dylan Thomas, and erasure poems from biographies, novels, and sources as unexpected as an astronomy text and online dictionary.

Here's a sample, an ekphrasic poem written while listening to the Charles Mingus Quintet playing "Alice's Wonderland," published first in Slow Trains Literary Journal, Fall 2005:

alice’s wonderland

mingus
jarring jazz
magic tunnel
chute

o my desire is spreading
sweet notes
raucous
jiving down
ears tuning to the treat

if i could eat this sound
i would be drugged
into the fancyland
of new tunes

never tasted fruit
tender meat
purple peals
all-night dreams

if i were feathered
charlie
i would sing
of you in birdland

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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.