Found Poetry Collages by Mary Bast: Undercover

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Undercover

I am me, an unfinished beast
All I had to do was stitch her
dumbfounded, thrashing, shaking,
it becoming apparent my Papa
had only one ambition, to punch.

An iron-grey morning with a low sky,
his hot face flashed at me, grunting,
She’s going to spew it all. I’d kill her but
the cunt would take the stack, computer,
library microfilm, drawings, photographs.

It never happened, of course.
I pulled out a sweater, smiling,
quashed it, would have forgot
(the cleaver dipped its square tip
into the cutting block and stayed).

A bright, warm morning in Arkansas,
carnival in daylight spurred under-
standing — rain fell, a stream
of frosty nuggets washed around me
and made it right: Papa will pay for it.

There’s a lot of that undercover
if the outside world would say.

Following instructions for PoMoSco's DIALED IN badge, I used the digits in my complete phone number, including area code, and decided each in sequence would correspond to the number of pages between first lines, repeating the complete sequence three times to generate text for this found poem.

Source: Katherine Dunn, Geek Love: A Novel, New York: Random House, First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, 2002. 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.