Found Poetry Collages by Mary Bast: the world's continuous coming-into-being

Friday, April 10, 2015

the world's continuous coming-into-being

seems like hallucination
this correspondence between
inner and outer landscapes
an unmapped theatre
of attachment and belonging

committed to a quest whose
necessity I could not refute
I lay in the darkness, felt a sense
of wildness at work in the world
memories a narrow, nameless fragment

longing for isolated islands
and a few happy moments
fading back into darkness
like an irregular drumbeat
or simply two rough circles of light

how exposed I felt, an in-
between creature with rough,
natural shape half-human, half-
marine, I creaked and groaned
like a whale on the move

yet fearless, an exile beached
out of sight of the sea, charmed
by the moon’s ability to silver the world
by wind’s voice, a braid of notes
to think in ways possible nowhere else

submarine twisting of currents
swarmed up a hundred-foot windstorm
territorial conflicts with biological
revelation, rooks haggled in the air
as though I were not there at all

Found poem, from Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places. New York: The Penguin Group, 2007. Print.

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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.