"The Labyrinth"
- and the difference layout can make to a poem.
I have always been a fan of Found Poetry. Although I produce it less often than I used to, I still enjoy some of the wonderful poems it can produce. It’s also interesting that, because you don’t start with your own words and are not ‘bound’ to them, you can find yourself somehow freed to play a little more with the formatting of a piece — and I don’t mean in the sense of succumbing to gimmickry.
What is Found Poetry?
“a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning” - Wikipedia
“Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage… A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions.” - poets.org
The example below is based on ‘Borneo’s Vast Underworld’ by Neil Shea from National Geographic, March 2019.
I include both a ‘standard’ free verse layout as well as a prose poem format. The words are identical — though it’s interesting how the piece reads slightly differently depending on how the words are laid out…
The Labyrinth Torch-beams dissolve in the void. In the seam between daylight and darkness, the immensity we’d discovered: gleaming pillars the colour of old bone, caverns lined with turbulent rivers, water at rest in limpid basins; and in a sudden deluge of life, the whir of innumerable insects, bats streaming like smoke out from the cave and into the sky.and
The Labyrinth Torch-beams dissolve in the void. In the seam between daylight and darkness, the immensity we’d discovered: gleaming pillars the colour of old bone, caverns lined with turbulent rivers, water at rest in limpid basins; and in a sudden deluge of life, the whir of innumerable insects, bats streaming like smoke out from the cave and into the sky.I still can’t decide which I prefer!
Found Poetry isn’t for everyone of course, and in some senses it might be regarded as ‘cheating’ — but writing Found Poetry can be a great tool to uncover the joy of manipulating words, an exercise in learning how to edit dispassionately given you are freed from the shackles of being emotionally attached to your first draft.
I always keep my eye open for found poetry. The joy is in recognising them. It's like finding a dropped pound coin in the street, but so much better sometimes. Here's one, absolutely word for word that I found a couple of weeks ago on a 'neighbourhood website'. I simply formatted it as a poem........
Smile for the Cameras
To all the rats
who come out at night,
especially the ones
who live in Stanley Street,
flashing their car lights,
drug dealing, smoking cannabis,
sniffing nitrous oxide,
throwing their takeaways,
gas canisters, rubbish everywhere,
music playing , off their heads,
behind the back of Warreners Walk ,
hiding so no one can see them,
ignorant disrespectful,
park outside your own houses,
you need to get job ,
obviously your wives don’t know,
keeping us awake all night,
you have been caught on camera,
and reported to the police.
Smile for the cameras.
yes, I see. And I so agree about needing to be freed from first drafts. I'm often amazed by how much editing, how many drafts I do (enjoyably) and are necessary. In a poem every comma, word, line counts, as the form is such a crucible....