Well, I must say, I thought the exercise from last class was pretty interesting. You could take any seemingly meaningless prose and turn into potentially life altering poetry if you tried hard enough. I think I'm semi-obsessed with making these mini poems now. And I'm just itching to post the one that I made in class...
Here goes nothin....(Its an excerpt from the Styles book--the chapter called Grace)
Title: Well Spoken
Eloquence
Indeed scarce
deserves the name of it
Consists chiefly in laboured and Polished period
An over-curious
Artificial arrangement
Words tinseled over
a gaudy embellishment of words
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First: that poem is fantastic. You've turned something so didactic into a mystery so open to wild interpretation. A class could sit around this and discuss it for an hour, and perhaps never figure out what it's really based off of.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious - when you made the poem, did you try to "hide" the original meaning? Did you try to emphasize or pronounce it or express your personal emotional reaction to it? Did you try to create an entirely new meaning(if yes, what is it)? Or, did you just create it so its completely ambiguous (even to yourself) and totally up to the reader's interpretation?
(I forgot "Second:")
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I think this exercise can be a great way to create completely original poetry of your own.
In my case, I'm much more comfortable expressing myself through prose. So I could just write a few paragraphs about something, and "blab" naturally. Then I could apply this method and then condense everything I've said into a brand new poem, derived from my own prose.
Are there any poets that are known to use this method?
Yep, lots of poets use this, even Emily Dickinson! Some believe that she cut lines out of her notebooks to form new poems.
ReplyDeleteYou can also try using markers or white-out on your magazines, sports scores, prose, etc. Finding images can often free them from their original context, creating--Dickinson again--an "internal difference/Where the meanings, are."
For one of the most gorgeous examples of found poetry, see Tom Philip's Humument.
This is amazing.
ReplyDeleteI'd never heard of found poetry before. I love how Tom Philips turns these pages into a visual art as well.
This found poetry is really incredible. I think it really emphasizes the visual power of poetry.
ReplyDeleteI would love to read a book that had pages like this.
I just spent like 30 min on that web page.
Why, thank you. I wasn't really trying to create anything profound. I omitted some parts of the sentence that I felt didn't really complement the poem.
ReplyDeleteReally, I think I was trying to emphasize the meaning of "eloquence" for me, rather than hide the actual meaning of the prose.
But you're so right. In the end, I guess it turned out to be more mysterious than I intended. (But a bit of mystery is always good right!)
That found poetry is amazing. I think I've just discovered a new hobby...
ReplyDelete