The Scrambled-Found-Poem

This assignment will be a final project in poetry, begun this week with your due of 4 Symbolic Poems, but it shouldn't be a cause for stress! We'll be finishing this as we wind down poetry.

I'll include images of my own progress as we work through this, but here's the run-down:

1) Locate a magazine, newspaper, junk letters from the mail...basically any print. If you don't have that, you can use an online newspaper and take a screenshot of it and highlight. The point is, like with Magnetic Poetry, to find words and phrases you like. I'll do so with a few magazines. I grabbed a National Geographic, a snippet from The Brothers Dostoevsky (a long Russian novel), and an old People magazine. I'll spend a few minutes finding words, and, like in Magnetic Poetry, I'll start to cluster them by an idea, an image, a theme, or a symbol of some sort.

I started with a phrase I liked: "Buffalo Commons." That sounds like a fun title.

2) Next, I'll keep cutting out things based on what I like, above, hoping to find ideas that are similar in concept, but that may help pull me away, a bit, from the idea.

3) Put them all on a paper, no particular order. My giant mess of phrases is here 9_1_20, 6_04 PM Office Lens 2.jpg

4) Now I'll take another look at them and rearrange them by kind. In this case I found where I thought I was starting with nature poetry, most of what caught my eye had some vaguely human aspect to it: hospitals, quotes, odd deep questions...nothing to do with the Buffalo in my title! I also had a few random lines. Check it out: Scrambled-Found Poetry step 2.docx Download Scrambled-Found Poetry step 2.docx

5) Next: add phrases and lines until you have about 15-20 lines of poetry. (I kept on rolling with mine for a bit) My rough draft: Step 3.docx Download Step 3.docx

6) Next: cut out the whole lines (don't separate individual words) and scramble these up, so your beautiful rough draft is a giant mess again, but at least your pretty phrases are intact! Honestly, this hurt a bit. I kinda liked that (totally fake) draft of a me-who-never-existed. Oh well. I then crossed out a few phrases I just didn't like, and as I did, I let my mind wander again: where would the poem take me now? Take a look at the soupy mess: chopped and hacked poem.jpg Download chopped and hacked poem.jpg

7) Finally: reorganize the lines, cut out words and add-to as needed, to see if you can now (finally) create a poem of a dozen-or-so lines that makes sense, but that may not logically be where you were originally pulled in your initial idea. This nonlinear approach to poetry just *might* trick your subconscious into something awesome, or at least a deviation, maybe involving some clever word-choices, of an idea you already wrote, so it's two drafts in one!

For this draft, I let my eyes again wander over the page of scrambled, jumbled lines. I cut out phrases I disliked and thought about themes I most found present: loneliness, humans and their bond to nature, loss... here's what I ended up with: The Buffalo Commons.docx Download The Buffalo Commons.docx

   So that's my final draft! And, you can note some of the lines I took (still, that hospital in Vietnam? That's nothing I know anything about!), and some of the themes I wrote about to try to use nature, found poetry, and human contact to describe loneliness, but yet hope through it all.

For you:

I'd love to see at least 3 uploads: at least an image of the words/phrases/images/ideas you used (anything is fair game, really, except complete snippets of other poetry), a rough draft before you cut it up again,  and a final draft. Good luck, and have fun!

(Note: I did this, myself, and found it to take about an hour and a half. It might take you less or more time, but do give yourself plenty of time to finish this! As always, I do take late work, so turn in something you're proud of!)