Tag Archives: found poetry

Day twenty-eight poem, LexPoMo 2015

Posted on June 29, 2015 | 1 comment

LPM2015-01-1024x768This is a found poem inspired by words from Rosie Seymour’s final guest blog post for Mslexia, a wonderful U.K. publication for women who write.

Reblogged from the Lexington Poetry Month blog.

how slowly the world of publishing

Success seems so sudden
when you aren’t a part
of the process. Writers seem to
burst onto the scene
from nowhere and shoot
to great heights but they don’t.

They edge their way
in with this piece and that, testing
the water, slowly
building
a reputation, showing
they can nail
a brief and hit a deadline.

(found poetry: https://mslexia.co.uk/rosies-last-post/­)

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Found poetry: proof of artificial intelligence?

Posted on October 3, 2013 | Leave a comment

The following appeared in my spam filter exactly as you see it except for a couple corrections to spelling and capitalization. The line and stanza breaks are also original, as is the title. It’s not particularly good, but the line breaks and some of the syntax suggested poetry to me. Since this kind of thing is auto-generated, it makes me wonder if there’s a spambot out there somewhere developing a poetic sensibility of sorts…

Brilliant Some Ideas

Not to scare you but you already contain chemicals within your very DNA that’ll
illuminate
under the right circumstances and you’d perish terribly without
them. It is termed phosphorus. Additionally you contain
an exploding material and a very deadly gasoline.
That could be sodium and chlorine. Together they make salt.
Which can be what helps to keep you hydrated and helps electrical signals in your system (naturally too much of something can eliminate you) and you’ve however other more terrifying substances in you
also.

Low-voltage outdoor lighting methods are inexpensive to work,
easy to install, safe and movable. Outside lighting additionally deters
crime, and makes jogging through your garden safer during the night.

You have taken out all of the stops to generate your
property and seem first-rate. So why let that hard work vanish at nightfall when,
with a flick off the transition and some smartly put
landscape lights, you can roll-back the night and set it all on display?
Completed right, landscape lighting makes the top of everything you have got by highlighting your home’s architectural functions and drawing
attention to revered plantings and trees.

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Spam poetry: Forests of Puget Sound

Posted on September 23, 2013 | Leave a comment

I’ve been playing with spam lately; I find the auto-translated stuff a great source of amusement and inspiration. The wonky syntax and near-psychedelic word juxtapositions light up all kinds of brain activity. Sometimes I take whole chunks and try to punctuate them so they make some kind of sense in English; other times I lift choice bits from here and there and combine them to see what happens. Here’s my favorite poem from this morning’s work:

Forests of Puget Sound

On a great treelined side freeway, a sanctioned handsome conical
specimen with simple roots and sagging, greygreen sharp needles
matured with regard to wet, detailed mud.

Always those already established Northwest mystics (to find
a reasonably sultry painting of them) have been a far more spectral
only no less helpful presence.

We simply come across your wife’s perception openly
once, many years after the scandal.

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Found poetry: Advice to a writer

Posted on August 23, 2013 | 2 comments

The other book I purchased from the gift shop at the Mark Twain House was also written by a New England author who had taken part in one of the wonderful writing workshops the museum sponsors. I’m working my way through the book very slowly, saving it for those days when I sit down to work and struggle to find something coherent to write.

Advice to a Writer

you should not walk
around with your heart
hanging open — there’s too much
danger out there
just find a way to make your heart
safe for opening slowly
chamber by chamber
so you can get back
to those in-the-moment
moments

— Nancy Slonim Aronie in Writing from the Heart: Tapping the Power of Your Inner Voice, p. 33 (Hyperion 1998)

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Found poetry: Judy

Posted on August 7, 2013 | 2 comments

While trolling the gift shop at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, earlier this summer, I found a table of books marked down to half price. Exercising nearly superhuman restraint, I only bought two titles, one of which was The Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant.  Near the end of the book, the following passage jumped out at me as something that might make a fair poem. Let me know what you think…

When Judy returned to the empty
house, she clapped her hands
at the pleasure of having it all

to herself again. She moved
her clothes back upstairs to the high
ceilings and windows she’d missed

all summer, and then strolled through the quiet
rooms, stopping in the library, where she emptied
the dregs of the Judge’s sherry into a crystal glass, put up

her feet, and watched the sunset
turn the harbor into a pink punch
bowl. The great clock ticked while

the gulls became black apostrophes
against the line of one endless lavender
cloud that stretched to the horizon.

– Anita Diamant, The Last Days of Dogtown, pp. 248-9 (2006 trade paper edition, Scribner 2005)

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Found poetry: Maya

Posted on July 12, 2013 | 2 comments

I’ve been reading (and thoroughly enjoying) Starhawk’s novel Walking to Mercury. Several passages jumped out for me the other day, and as I copied them into my journal I found myself breaking the lines to make them into poems. (Maya is the name of the main character in the novel.)

***

Maybe this world is a thigh bone
trumpet, a temple horn through
which compassion calls. When we
respond, miracles happen.

– Maya, p. 412

***

Dead, he could have been anything
we wanted him to be. But alive, he was always
a small danger, a continual secret that we had
to bury, lest he turn up and turn into something
we didn’t expect and couldn’t cope with.

– Maya, p. 415

***

That’s why human beings were harder to love
than mountains, she thought. People were always
constructing themselves, using each other

as blue prints and foils and mirrors. Mountains were just
mountains, high or low, craggy or rounded,
forested or bare. They formed themselves

not in relationship to some ideal but in response
to real things: the shifting of the earth’s
plates, the pressure of molten lava, the action

of wind and rain and running water.

– Maya, p. 416

(all quotes from Walking to Mercury by Starhawk, 1997 Bantam edition)

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Found poetry: more Alicia

Posted on June 5, 2013 | Leave a comment

Things got kind of busy the last half of our vacation, but I did find time to read, make notes, and write, even if I didn’t have quite enough time to post. Here’s another striking passage from L.M. Montgomery’s “The Red Room.” If you have ideas about different ways to break the lines, please share them in the comments — I’d love to see them!

Alicia at the Ball

Her gown was of white, and there was nothing
I could liken the stuff to save moonshine
falling athwart a frosted pane, and out from it
swelled her gleaming breast and arms, so bare
that it seemed to me a shame
to look upon them. Yet it could not be denied
they were of wondrous beauty, white
as polished marble.

And all about her snowy throat and rounded
arms, and in the masses of her splendid hair, were sparkling,
gleaming stones, with hearts of pure light, which I know
to have been diamonds, but knew not then, for never
had I seen aught of their like.

And I gazed at her, drinking
in her beauty until my soul was filled, as she stood
like some goddess before her worshiper.

– L.M. Montgomery, “The Red Room”

(from Among the Shadows, edited by Rea Wilmshurst, 1991 Bantam edition, p. 164)

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Found poetry: The Red Room

Posted on May 31, 2013 | 2 comments

I’ve been reading a collection of short stories by L.M. Montgomery, beloved author of Anne of Green Gables. The stories were chosen because they reflect the darker side of Montgomery’s writing, and include supernatural elements as well as crime, tragedy, and despair. They aren’t grim or gritty, though, and contain some lovely turns of phrase and descriptive passages that have made me smile in delight, such as the following, which simply begged to be turned into a poem.

Alicia

Nor can I paint her to you
in words as I saw her then, with the long
tongues of firelight licking her
white neck and wavering over the rich
masses of her red-gold hair.

All the passion and fire of her
foreign nature burned in her splendid
eyes, that might have been
dark or light for aught
that I could ever tell, but which seemed
always like pools of warm
flame, now tender, now fierce.

Her skin was like a delicate white
rose leaf, and when she spoke
I told my foolish self that
never had I heard music before;
nor do I ever again think to hear
a voice so sweet, so liquid as that
which rippled over her ripe lips.

– L.M. Montgomery, “The Red Room”

(from Among the Shadows, edited by Rea Wilmshurst, 1991 Bantam edition, p. 141)

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Horoscopoetry

Posted on May 24, 2013 | Leave a comment

(I’ve been away from writing and posting for several days because my mom had knee replacement surgery and my sisters and I provided round-the-clock tag-team coverage during her hospital stay. The surgery went well and she’s pretty much back to her ornery self, all the more so because PT makes her cranky.)

This poem was inspired by/lifted from Rob Brezsny, who is my favorite astrologist because he makes his recommendations with such creative flair. I often clip his columns to use as writing prompts, and this came from an old column I found while cleaning.

Aries, 15 November 2007

I love it when you forget
your troubles and become lost
thinking about the problems
of your friends.

I love it when you focus
entirely on the heat rising
from a cup of coffee or the sunlight
reflected in a puddle or the mysterious
expression that graces
the face of a stranger.

I love it when you prove
how much you love being
here, now, by turning your attention
onto every little thing
outside yourself.

When I first drafted this, I didn’t have terminal punctuation at the end of each stanza. I not sure whether I like it this way or not. What do you think?

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Found poetry: from the library

Posted on May 15, 2013 | 4 comments

One of the many things I enjoyed about working at publishing houses was reading Publisher’s Weekly, which made the rounds through the office each week. I always wanted to make poems out of the lists of new titles, but that wasn’t what I was being paid for so I never did.

The lines for this poem came from titles on the large print shelves at my local branch library. I haven’t modified them, though I did run a few together, just for fun.

***

the bone garden twice loved
the house of women
one true place beyond compare

the secret between us
the tarnished eye kissed by shadows
savage vision falling together

once upon a river of fire
Sonoma rose above suspicion
diving in the dark celebration

miles to go wicked all day
maybe this time the blessed exact revenge
the traveling kind

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