Found Poems by Salon Members

Please note: selections have been published in order of their submission. If you'd like to publish your found poem on the blog, please submit it via the Writers Salon yahoo group.


AN ANCIENT IMMOVABLE ARM

An ancient immovable arm,
Invisible, balanced.
An ancient immovable arm,
With prolong sound, merged people with pain, grief,
Energy, fierce pride and pleasure.

The words were borrowed from Webster, page 797 (Ms).

Kalman Kivkovich

A CONSTELLATION OF GROWTH

A constellation of days designated
for planting trees,
for flowing water, not restrained or limited,
style flavored with caraway seeds,
people growing, trembling or quivering with excitement.

Words taken from Webster's Dictionary Page 63 (A's)

Sandi Kivkovich


POPEYE'S "SMOKING GUN"

This new food fear
becomes inconvenient again.
71 percent were women,
after discovering
an opened bag of spinach.
Nine California farms
zero in on three
health authorities.
The "smoking gun"
has died.
Watch how the leafy green,
the tainted greens,
could be a crucial clue.

from the CNN article "Health chiefs find 'smoking gun' spinach" dated 9/21/06
Jason Gallagher

Find Found Poetry

Exercise Your InkTank
Writing without Composing

If you’ve never heard of found poetry, you’re about to because:
1. It’s everywhere
2. Everybody’s doing it, whether they intent to or not (see Donald Rumsfeld)
3. It’s a good way to see language as language
4. Its critique of the way we use language is implicit (built-in)
5. Its critique of the culture in which the original text was created is implicit
6. You’ve decided to attend the Salon and there’s no escaping it now

The rules are very simple: using ordinary texts from the world around you, create a poem. Do not write. Compose. You may subtract lines of text and re-arrange them, but you may not add any words or phrases of your own. Your poem need not follow any formal structure (although it can, if you like) but pay close attention to what line breaks can do to the meaning and rhythm of your lines. A line as simple as the one I am writing now, can begin to look like a poem quite easily:

A line as simple
As the one I am
Writing now can
Begin to look like a poem
Quite easily.

Below you’ll find a few examples of famous (notorious) found poems. A simple Google search will provide you with a few thousand or million more. We’ll draw our original texts from a hat. Should no hats prove present or available to us, original texts will be drawn in some other equally exciting and totally random fashion. Feel free to write on your original text (maybe crossing out or highlighting words or phrases) and then transfer your found poem to the back of this sheet. Try to compose (not write) at least five lines. We’ll share them and then the best (to be determined by wild hooting and hollering) will be published on the blog.

THE UNKNOWN
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002,
Department of Defense news briefing


A CHALLENGE TO YOUR SPIRIT
Girls and boys of America
Are the hope of the world!
You can’t evade it, young America.
And are you going to go on dancing
And spinning on your ear?
What are you thinking about, sitting
There staring into the dark?
Haven’t you been lying around long
Enough?
Shouldn’t you go to work?
Find as interesting a subject as possible.
Write as vivid a sketch as you can
Of a person who attracts you or an animal.

Annie Dillard from “Junior High English” from Mornings Like This: Found Poems

Take-Out Sestina

The Take-Out Assignment for the week is to write a sestina with these six (Salon-generated) end-words: metrosexual, obtuse, crystal, equivocate, time bomb, terrorist. Take a look at the craftshop post for the formal structure the sestina follows. Consider shifting the words for variety and telling a story with a cohesive narrative. We'll take a look at these on Thursday -- we've already seen a few remarkable entries.

Orange saccharine Narcotics Orgasm Frosty Cascade

A Partial Sestina by the Salon Collective on the Spot

Her eyes caught my gaze like fresh narcotics
An unattented hookah burned shisha so saccharine
Silvery water that roared nature's orgasm
Evaporating condensing perspiration turned frosty
Removing all memory of a world with colors rippling red ostentatious orange.

Better than narcotics are oranges
What the hell am I doing with these narcotics
They only make the rings in my nost frosty
It lingers on the lips of my love like an orgasm
Goose bumps down my back cascade

Down Main Street we cascade
To a room painted bright orange
Many colors in your mind like a mental orgasm
Stawberry fields forever these are great narcotics
Ripped out mouth smiles saccharine
Frosty

Formal Attire

Exercise Your InkTank

Today we’re going to try on some formal constraints. That’s right. We’re getting conventional up in here. Maybe you’ve written some formal poetry before, a few pantoums or a villanelle, perhaps. Maybe you’ve written poems before but nothing formal because formal poetry is stale and frusty and/or absolutely terrifying. Or maybe you’ve never written a poem before at all. No matter your disposition or level of experience, the truth (and it’s not one I’m making up this time) is that formal constraints are a good way to free yourself from habit and to invite real invention into your writing space. You may find a new turn of phrase or a new image, a new story or a new voice, or you may simply find that a new form reminds you of what you valued in more familiar forms. At a minimun, you’ll leave today having written a sestina with your fellow Salonists.

The Suit
A sestina. Let’s talk about what that is first: It’s a poem consisting of six six-line stanzas and one three-line envoy. The end-words (we’ll generate these together) in each stanza are the same, but they follow different sequences. Here’s the pattern the sestina follows:

1 2 3 4 5 6 - End words of lines in first sestet.
6 1 5 2 4 3 - End words of lines in second sestet.
3 6 4 1 2 5 - End words of lines in third sestet.
5 3 2 6 1 4 - End words of lines in fourth sestet.
4 5 1 3 6 2 - End words of lines in fifth sestet.
2 4 6 5 3 1 - End words of lines in sixth sestet.
(6 2) (1 4) (5 3) - Middle and end words of lines in tercet.

The Tailors
Who comes up with this stuff? In this case, the French. The sestina appeared in France in the twelfth century, initially in the work of a troubadour. Why are we here at InkTank writing a sestina? Because the sestina is one of the best poetic forms for storytelling. Its repetition and long line-length make it an ideal form for our purposes. What are our purposes? We’re all about storytelling here, no matter the genre. Why do we keep using forms the French developed? It is merely a coincidence, I assure you.