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Found poetry prompt: The archive of love

Think of the handmade gifts, notes, or scraps you’ve been given - the things you can’t throw away. They can be from your children or anyone. Think of things that don’t fit in anywhere or are not polished enough to be framed. Imagine them as an archive. What story do they tell about you, or about their gives? Let the objects speak for themselves - find inspiration in their uneven structures, words that make no sense or make sense only to you, misspellings, odd colours, and torn edges. Find inspiration in the most mundane.

My poem: An archive of love

A birthday song of a different kind,
Booklets and rhyme, sweet boys of mine,

“Can you close your eyes, ‘mumee’”?

Far away, rain batters the ground,

A figure dressed in neon green, “that’s a
girl just like you, ‘mumey’”,

Dotted with hearts, this box they give me,

Fixed with tape, so it doesn’t
break, even if the world does.

“Can you hold it now, mummy?”

Gold jewels I’d forever keep.

-MS-

For an additional challenge, who can spot what inspired the format of this piece? HINT: the first letter of each line and the format correspondent with a special piece in the pile!

Let me know what you think, and share your pieces, I’ll love to read them!

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I hope you love this writing prompt just as I do!

Step 1: Browse TIME Magazine’s Vault

Go over to: https://time.com/vault/

Click on: BROWSE BY YEAR (the tab on the top left) or if you fancy BROWSE BY SUBJECT (see screenshot below for your reference). Pick a year or subject you like - I picked 2017.

Step 2: Create and share

Create your found poem - you could create a blackout or cut-out poem, or let the covers inspire your piece any way you like.

Share your poem - share it in the comments or if you post it on your own Substack, drop your link below. I would love to see what you come up with and give you some feedback if you like!

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The storm keeps getting stronger, and so do we - my found poem using TIME Magazine covers from 2017

I picked covers from 2017 for my poem. That was the year I became a mother. The cover itself are food-for-thought, taking us through the rollercoaster year it was! It’s a year after ‘post-truth’ became the Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2016. I’ve chosen to do something of a cut-out poem - I’ve re-arranged the source text to create my poem.

Ripped at the seams of motherhood, 

I ask, what is a good son, 

and how do I raise one? 

The world’s a swamp hotel, 

predators wrecking futures, 

is truth dead? 

In this survival guide for boom times, 

let’s talk about things that trap us, 

like grief, inventions and weight loss, 

and the goddess myth - 

the vision of perfect motherhood,

bodies shrunk in nightmares, 

what’s it worth to be yourself? 

But see, frayed at the edges,

resistance grows… 

our last best hope,

to dismantle hate. 

- MS -

(A little note: I feel that the poem doesn’t necessary flow as smoothly as I want it to - but this is my attempt to keep putting myself out there even though it’s not 100% perfect!)

I would love to read yours!

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The other day, I wrote a post on breaking silence. In marking Women’s History Month this March, and also International Women’s Day, which falls tomorrow, I’m inviting you to think about the women from the past who broke a type of silence, and also women from the present who continue to do so. What stories of women have shaped your lives, what stories of women do you hold with care? These can be women you’ve read about or women who are near and dear to you.

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A writing prompt: create a found poem or black poem

Find a historic text related to women - women’s rights, women’s political history, women’s domestic life.. anything, and create a found poem or blackout poem based on that! This can be a newspaper article, a poster, a novel, a poem, or whatever you come across. Please remember to credit the original source.

I created a found poem based on this article published on the Evening Post on January 21, 1975. I found the original article on the British Newspaper Archive.

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Here’s the text of my poem:

The weight carried

off the slipway

by hand,

keeping fires burning,

knitting

‘stop’

between the shafts,

women would rise,

grow

from the dust.

(- MS -)

The British Newspaper Archives, specifically this blog post, has some useful resources if you are looking for something historic. Or a google search also brings up various old newspaper articles, posters, reports, and declarations.

I would love to read what you write. Share your responses in the comments, or if you post your poems in your own pages, drop me your link.

A note to add - the ‘so what’ in the title of the piece is drawn from the newspaper article I’ve used as my found poem.

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I still remember one of the questions Liz asked early on in the workshop, “what does tenderness mean to you?”

For some reason, when she asked that question, I immediately thought of the broken toy ukulele that was lying around in our house. I had used some tape as a temporary fix because my little boy wanted it put together.

To me, ‘tenderness’ conveys fragility, it conveys the idea that things and people can so easily break. In many ways, our children are so tender, and I wish I could keep them from not breaking as they grow older. I wish I could preserve this tenderness of theirs forever.

Writing poetry allowed me - in many ways - preserve their tenderness.

Here’s an image prompt for you:

Use the image of the ukulele - broken and fixed with tape - to inspire your poem. The object may be something trivial or dear. What does a broken ukulele signify to you? What does it mean to fix something this way - temporarily, with only the material you have at hand? Will the fix hold on?

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For further inspiration…

The opening lines of this short poem (or note as I call it), is of course inspired by Cold Play's Fix You.

The line, ‘a thousand times over’ is inspired by Khaled Hosseini’s Kite Runner. Hosseini ends his stunning novel with those words

I would love to read your poems in the comments!

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A lot of the poetry I write is inspired by found objects. I love experimenting with this form. Giving meaning to some of these mundane everyday objects, and seeing where that leads me.

Very simply, found poetry involves extracting words, phrases, and passages from other sources (such as newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, documents, other poems, spam emails, magazine articles etc.), and shaping them into poetic form. The power of found poetry lie in how words not intended as poetry can take on new meaning.

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Forms, techniques, and practices

Found poetry can take the form of both ‘treated’ and ‘untrea

ted’ poems. In ‘treated’ poems, a poet would alter the original text, changing its format, syntax, meaning, and context. However, in some found poems, poets would opt to make minimum interventions or alterations (‘untreated’), adding only line breaks or spacing to create a poem.

Some common forms, techniques, and practices (as highlighted in The Found Poetry Review):

• Free-form excerpting and remixing: extracting words and phrases from found material and re-organising them to create poetry

• Cut-outs: cut-out words/phrases from the found material, rearranging those cut-outs to create something new

• Erasure and blackout: poets take an existing text, and can either erase or black out words, revealing new meaning through the remaining words. The remaining words are not rearranged, and a poet can also engage further with the found material, adding sketches, notes, photographs, and other bits.

• Cento: an ancient poetic form, poets juxtapose lines from other writings. While the original lines are unchanged, they are re-arranged and presented in new contexts. It resembles a patchwork of sorts.

Influences and examples

Found poetry techniques were influenced by the Dada and Surrealism movements, which emphasised the juxtaposition of unrelated and everyday material in art and poetry. Such characteristics influenced various poetic forms and techniques, including cut-out writings.

The cut-out poetry technique was popularised by poets such as William S. Burroughs in the mid-20^th Century. For example, his poem, Formed in the Stance, uses found text from a 1959 Saturday Evening Post article on cancer cures. An extract is below,

“….The girls eat morning
Dying peoples to a white bone monkey
in the Winter sun
touching tree of the house. ....”

A prominent example of altering found material is Tom Phillips’ work, A Humument. In 1966, Phillips set out to use methods of painting, collage, and cut-out in alternating the pages of the first second-hand book he found for three pence. He came upon a forgotten Victorian text, A Human Document, and began its ‘radical treatment’. Some of the pages of A Humument are available on the author’s website: https://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument/slideshow/1-50

In another example, Ian Hamilton Finlay, used names and serial numbers of Scottish fishing boats in his poems, Sea-Poppy I and Sea-Poppy II. Finlay also used graphic patterns and other visual means, to rearrange words and letters, in conveying meaning, with the letters of Sea Poppy poems arranged in circular patterns, resembling the shape of a flower: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/finlay-sea-poppy-i-collaboration-with-alistair-cant-p07451.

Your turn

• There is poetry everywhere! Get hold of any text that you fancy. Junk mail? Menu cards? Shopping lists? The back of cereal boxes?

• Draw inspiration from any of the forms, techniques or examples discussed above, to create your found poem.

• Be aware of copyright, especially when using someone else’s work – credit the original source as needed.

Have a go!

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