Found Poetry Collages by Mary Bast: torn by terrible conflict

Thursday, April 9, 2015

torn by terrible conflict

animated by vile passions
amused by ready wits
polluted by indiscreet eyes
overmastered by Fate
taken completely by surprise

overcome by sweet slumbers
touched by earnestness
struck by simplicity
spurred on by hope of reward
hoodwinked by disguise

awed by impatience
choked by surging wrath
impelled by fatality
overawed by misery
crushed by pride

Many of the PoMoSco projects have widened my appreciation for language and that's especially true for this one, X:Y. The X:Y instructions were to choose a syntactical relationship between words and create a poem from phrases fitting that pattern.

Source text: The Project Gutenberg EBook The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28808/28808_readme.txt)

No comments:

Post a Comment

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.