Finding a Voice

This weekend I went to a used bookstore to find something for a friend and, of course, also found something for me: Annie Dillard poems for $3.00. This little treasure has turned me onto the idea of "found poetry," as evidenced by the raft of inspirations from the children's science textbook. I have thought for almost 8 years now that I would like to write some poems about human relationships being like earthquakes, but not knowing much about earthquakes had very limited knowledge upon which to draw. Then an elementary-school teacher friend gave me a couple of cast-off science textbooks with sections about earthquakes in them. I hadn't touched them until Annie Dillard got me going that direction. Thanks so much, Annie!

"'Found' poems are essentially built from bits of broken text. The poems are original as poems; their themes and their orderings are invented. Their sentences are not. Words can be dropped but not added. In the course of composing such poems, the author's intentions are usually the first to "go." A nineteenth century Russian memoir of hunting and natural history yields a poem about love and death. A book of nineteenth century oceanographic data yields a poem about seeing. This is editing at its extreme: writing without composing."

- Annie Dillard, "Introduction," Mornings Like This: Found Poems

FOUND POETRY: This month, simply pick up a volume that has been sitting on your self [sic.] for a while (perhaps unread), and look at it with new eyes, the eyes that search for combinations of words that will make a poem. Copy some passages out. Play with the line breaks. See what happens. At the very worst, abandon the whole idea but keep a couple of the word combinations, ideas, or phrases for a poem of your own.