My Engl 250 class, Teaching Writing, has been working on Found Poems. Today we finished our first drafts. Here’s a photo of mine:

…and here’s what it says:

Do you remember

Your first kiss?

Everyone said it was foolish

The hue and cries of

“Forget a summer-only love”

It was serendipity the day

the spell was cast

Indelible images

taste

madness

light

somewhere lost in time, the past

everytime I turn around,

I find glimpses of a lost world

A whole new world beneath me

Wild memories

don’t flow in straight lines.

Every once in a while we would sit down and ask ourselves: “Are we crazy?”

But we weren’t.

It’s the most profound mystery of all science.

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So, next step for all of us is to look over the sticky-note comments we received and work on the next draft. I have to decide if this is really a poem, or if it needs to go another direction. What I’d like to do is work it into some art work, or make a cine-poem. I have a few days coming up in Philadelphia in which I can play with it.

I love this particular assignment because it gives me a chance to create without pressure. Like I told the group this morning, none of us wrote a poem– we found them. Or maybe they found us. But there’s something so cool about scattering a bunch of words out and moving them around the desktop until the poem begins to emerges.

As Michaelangelo said,

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

I moved the pieces of words cut from old magazines around until wild memories found their way to the top. Eh, doesn’t sound as romantic, but I’ll take my muse any way I find her.