Found Poetry Collages by Mary Bast: new route to old roots

Saturday, April 4, 2015

new route to old roots

ruined, done for, demolished
kaput with audio
capo, caprice, capitulum
incapacitated, capitate
too many versions of kubuntu ubuntu
distinguish root from hair
the first root clearly intra-object
a second attempt
democratizing access to calculus
Julius Pokorny’s poorly justified
phonetically Indo-European root
defines kaput: button, knot, block
fusiform, bristly toothed
glabrous, half clasping
kdesu as root is kaput too
kap meaning take
kaput meaning head
and kap-ro meaning
PIE root never existed
what then etymology
of Sanskrit कka 'head'?
in Proto-Germanic haubidam
the form is kapúcchala
butte, chute, flute, hoot, jute
knout, lute, mute, route, snoot

I had SO much fun with this one. Instructions: Come up with an unlikely word combination and Google it. Compose a poem using only the page titles and short descriptions Google displays — do not click into the sites themselves to grab more text.

My word combination = "kaput root."

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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.