Found Poetry Collages by Mary Bast: Is Paris Wise?

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Is Paris Wise?

A small inheritance, off alone
to study avant garde art, bold
gesture, a little risqué, reaching
for the apple, first time out,
rebel capturing a moment.
Unusual riches – affinity
between women sitting free
and easy, knee over knee,
lightness, laughing, smoking,
bohemian, disheveled, beautiful.
Harmony exempt from morality,
nature’s gate open – a threshold.

But something amiss – anxieties,
dangers that beset girls, social
constraints (you’ll get in trouble).
Resistance begs the question –
upset by someone else, a voyeur.
He saw her from the window,
woman as subject, protected.
Impression – walled garden,
conventional object among objects,
borders, heaviness, ennui,
terra cotta fabric, flesh. Domestic,
narrow path, no doorway through.
Come closer – her face
perplexed, desire to be read.
Against the wall, bird in a cage.

To earn the INTERLOPER badge I took notes during the Women in Impressionism talk at the Harn Museum on April 19, 3:00 pm, with University of Florida Professor of Art History Melissa Hyde and Harn Director of Education/Curator of Academic Programs Eric Segal.

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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.