Found Poetry Collages by Mary Bast: An Armadillo-Leprosy Link Had Long Been Suspected

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

An Armadillo-Leprosy Link Had Long Been Suspected

Though the hundreds of thousands of European starlings on our hands,
snakes—cobra, python, rat snake, boa—owned by ten Delhi charmers
needed a canoe to get into Ankarea—the island off the coast of Madagascar,
ground at top speed about three months to wheel away from danger
that buried hundreds, soon 911 calls restored the natural commotion.

It’s amazing, but water-efficient conservation techniques like drip
irrigation let the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers get its experience
of an eight-mile pipeline to a tropical Pacific town that is water vapor.
Well, imagine we had planted trees on the prairie.
We probably would have had record warmth.

Everybody knows that ranking cities for livability grows the constant watch.
The natural climate cycles, especially El Niňo, turn the curtain
of the mid-latitudes wind shear needed for those storms, including
the lower 48 if it lets up, to spawn data with computer construction models.
And no one’s been hurt in 50-plus years.

Source Text: September 2012 issue of National Geographic.

PoMoSco instructions, one of several Chance Operations, were to ROLL THE DICE to determine which line in the source text to include in a phrase bank, continuing until I had enough to craft the above.

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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.