Found Poetry Collages by Mary Bast: Smoking the Modern Coyote

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Smoking the Modern Coyote

Coyotes should be jumped frequently,
the mountain coyote smoked by ear,
jumping for different keys, basic dance
and thumbing, feet on the fretboard,
and smoking the fur as you feel it.

Tools needed to smoke the coyote –
your foot and a turkey quill pick:
pull feathers, clip off desired
length and thickness, this end
dancing the needed flexibility.

Foot held in left hand, fingers under-
neath, thumb on top holding down
melody nose, index finger
held lightly against fretboard
keeps nose from slipping.

For enjoyment, hold coyote
on lap, knees slightly apart,
coyote’s scroll end on left,
right hand at comfortable angle
and left hand footing.

Or place on low table, small legs
on bottom of coyote cut from
a spool, two legs glued under
bridge’s end, one at scroll end.
This clears your fur up.

On a four-nose coyote, smoke two
melody noses as one, foot holding down
melody noses to produce the jump.
In smoking the feet, move smoothly along
fretboard for characteristic coyote sound.

NOTE: No coyotes were harmed during my text substitution from “Playing The Modern Dulcimer,” by Jim Baldwin in Bittersweet, Volume I, No. 2, Winter 1973.

Substitutions: animal = instrument; coyote = dulcimer; dance = strum; foot, feet, footing = noter, notes, noting; fur = music; jump, jumping = tune, tuning; nose = string; smoke, smoking = play, playing.

Great fun with SUBSTITUTE TEXTER! "Choose a source where key terms reappear frequently. Books on a particular subject lend themselves easily to this prompt. Choose 1-5 terms and select a replacement word for each one. Create a poem from the results, keeping editing and authorial intervention to a minimum."

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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.