It’s difficult for me to imagine that I’ve had a Facebook account for at least 17 years, but a Facebook memory popped up this week to prove it. It caught my attention became of the title: “Who Were You in My Dream?”
I thought, why does that sound like a poem?
Probably because it was. But not just any poem.
One Saturday afternoon in the summer of 2009, back when Twitter was called Twitter, three people were having a Twitter conversation – L.L. Barkat, Jim Woods, and myself. Somehow, the subject turned to poetry (well. L.L. Barkat was involved, so that was probably inevitable), and we began tweeting poetic lines at each other. And an idea was born. What about doing a poetry jam on Twitter?
Take a text, any text. It might be a paragraph from a novel, an excerpt of an essay, a newspaper article, a poem, words in advertisements, or your own journal. Then look for ideas, words that stand out, sentences or phrases that can be formed by extracting words. Highlight what you’ve selected, or black out the surrounding text. Assemble the selected words in a new text, or you can simply leave them as is. What you have is a found poem.
It’s not as easy as it might sound. In fact, it can as much time, thought, and effort as writing an original poem. A found poem can both construct and deconstruct a text.
Ezra Pound extracted words and phrases from historical letters and government documents to help create his Cantos. A poetry collection based on the press briefings of Donald Rumsfeld was published in 2003. Found pounds have been created from baseball calls by the announcer for the New York Yankees. Other sources of found poems have been the etiquette books of Emily Post, the trial testimony of Charles Manson, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, Wonder Woman comics books, and more.
Poet J.I. Kleinberg collected examples of phrases and texts involved the word “we.” She explains that it is an inclusive word, implying all or at least a group. “We suggests the whole greater than the sum of its parts, the possibility of empathy, humanity, history, we inclusive of good and bad, familiar and surprising, guilty, optimistic, despairing…” She didn’t so much assemble the phrases as she designed the words into found poems (her master’s degree is in design).
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered beginning in 1947. A group of Bedouin shepherds discovered clay jars almost a thousand years old in desert caves. Jars kept being discovered into 1956. Selections from the scrolls are being exhibited this year at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. And Michael De Sapio at The Imaginative Conservative explains why the scrolls are so important to Western civilization.
It happened back in the 1920s, a time of excess, prosperity, and broad disillusionment. America seemed to fall in love with vicious killers. And now, it seems to be happening again. Daniel Darling at The Daily Wire explains why America, or some subset of Americans, now worships its cold-blooded killers.
I have been bombarded by emails from people described as marketing experts, agents, editors, and book promoters, often with elaborate descriptions of my novels and how wonderful they are. Your heart might react a little, until you realize that all of these experts are likely derived from an AI application and the whole thing is a scam. Tim Challies explains how scammers are targeting Christian authors.
