Poetry Friday: Zentangle-ish Poems

Have you heard of Zentangles?  I had not, before this challenge.  It's a form of meditative drawing, explained better here. 

It's also, I learned, a way to enhance a found poem. (A found poem is one drawn from words "found" in existing texts.) The idea is to use Zentangle patterns to block out unneeded words, and also, to accentuate the shape and flow of the poem itself.  Here's a lovely explanation and several examples. 

Well, readers, I did not exactly "un-tangle" my thoughts about this challenge before I Zoomed with my Poetry Sisters, so I had questions. LOTS of questions.  And fears.  Found poetry, while fun, is frustrating because while you can select your words, you cannot re-order them.  Worse, I'm not great with precise patterns or lines or drawing in general.  The idea of using large sections of small marks to block out most of a perfectly good page was frightening. Plus, working in pen---so no going back! 

But, like most things, She Who Whines the Loudest...Falls the Hardest, and I wound up loving this challenge, once I made it my own. I gave myself the grace of working on multiple copies of a piece of text until I was more sure of the words I picked.  I learned that I didn't have to cover every inch of a page, nor did I have to use established patterns.  I could make my poems Zen-tangle-ISH.  

In the end, I created three poems in two days.  I'll share them in the order I created them.

First, a poem I created from a text in Michael Sims' book, Adam's Navel, A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form. I chose this text for its juicy words (too juicy, it turns out, because I kept being distracted by sentences like "The tongue is seldom noteworthy in birds, but the flamingo is cursed with one so muscularly tasty that Roman emperors served them by the bowlful."  Yeah, try competing with THAT.) 

 Anyway, I found a poem fairly easily, but was unhappy with my initial attempt to connect the words with lines. I wound up finding a better answer in one of the found words: encodes.  What if I simply encoded (or over-coded?) the rest of the text in a binary "ones and zeros" pattern?  

Language encodes

 a diverse sweetness

providing the throat

 chocolate

and peaches

----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved) 

Not bad.  I liked the poem. The drawing---eh.  Not much.  I tried again.  This time, I used a page from a Food52 catalog, and I left most of the underlying text intact, using graphics to show the reader how to read it.  

A well-balanced summer:

Start with sun.

Add wild flowers.

When in doubt,

bring friends...

and read. 

----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved) 

Better.  And as a bonus, I discovered a trick of word selection. I didn't have to select an entire word; I could truncate it.  In that last line, "read" was "bread."  I also liked how the poem and the visuals and underlying text interacted.  (Relating the background text to the found poem is not part of the challenge, but I liked the extra layer. You could even create a poem that strongly contrasts with your background text---a poem about peace taken from a war declaration, for example.) 

Finally, I created a third poem from an article in the Hill Rag (a local paper here in DC.) The text was about a Little Free Library, something I plan to put out front of our house now that we've stopped moving and I can tend it. Capitol Hill is home to many Little Free Libraries (and even one Little Free Art Gallery) and they fascinate me---the unique designs and the people who dig through them, and often, the quotes that the owners will affix to the side. Truly, they are small wonders. 

However, my poem turned out to be about something more elusive:  the magic of making things.  

You'll probably have to zoom in to read the poem as the original text was quite small and printed on newspaper. 

 MAGIC

a recursive

 natural thing

a precise 

confidence

a chance to 

obsessively build 

the unbelievable. 

        -----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved) 

Maybe I overdid it on the bricks (we recently had the bricks in our 1880s house repointed so I'm hyper-aware of their shapes) ....or maybe I didn't go far enough....could I cover more of the page to make the words of the poem stand out?  Perhaps it doesn't matter because I loved making this one.  It felt meditative. Zen-ish. As if my mind un-tangled for a brief time. Magic.  

See how my Poetry Sisters tangled this challenge below (a few of us are taking a break)

Liz

Andi

Tricia

Laura

Tanita

Kelly

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise.  (BONUS:  Linda is offering a fun "Clunker Exchange" where you can exchange one of your poetry lines for one of hers.)  

Poetry Friday: Wiseguy (A Found Poem)

Athlete of cross work

Lover of up-and-down

Word wonder 2 briefly

Not Done

My source for this found poem was Merl Reagle's last crossword for the Washington Post. I solved it with a heavy heart:

Read the Post's nicely done obituary. And don't miss the movie they mention, Word Play.  Bonus points if you can find the Simpsons episode Reagle starred in, as himself. 

All of my Poetry Sisters are in with Found Poetry today, too. Maybe we should call ourselves the Salvage Sisters this month:

Liz

Tricia

Laura

Kelly

Andi

Tanita

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Linda at Teacher Dance.

Poetry Friday: Finding (and keeping) Poetry

Y & O i U h C a O t M e P y L o E u T f E o M r E i t

I found this poem written on the inside of a gazebo. It was one of those fake "welcoming" structures rigged up at the entrance to a large subdivision. No graffiti on the outside---the kids were smarter than that. But inside! Score!

Anyhow, it made me think about all the places you can stash poetry. This is one way I collect it:




I like copying some poems out by hand. (That one in the picture is Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens.) Others, I cut out of the newspaper or photocopy or type up, and then I paste the poem onto a blank page. Like a poetry scrapbook.

Once, after a move, I was unpacking my books and found my scrapbook with several pages "filed" in the back, where I hadn't had time to paste them in. (As you see in the picture, I'm still behind!) I pulled out the pages and read one of the typed poems, which was nine stanzas long. Wow! It was gutsy, and achingly complicated and sad, and funny too. Then I got to the end and saw my name.

Yes, really. I had written it. I even found the notes in my own handwriting that I had taken as this poem hit me up the side of the head, and ambushed me right in the middle of a writer's conference breakout session. (It was an illustrator's talk. I blame the artist. Entirely.)

So, obviously, I should write my poems on bigger things that are harder to misplace. Like gazebos. Here are the first two stanzas:

I.
The boat is sinking. He knows.
The varnish moves over the surface,
Circles radiating from the can,
As he holds the edge of his wooden canvas,
The boat that is sinking. He knows
She is large, thick,
As he paints her,
In one day, into the varnish.

II.
She can’t eat while she is being painted.
He can’t paint while she is eating.
“Paint me eating,” she says. “Paint me
With juice in my hair. Paint my body
While my lips move.” “You look different
When you eat,” he says. “Your colors shift.
I’ll wait.” She hides a sunflower seed between
Her thighs. He flicks it away.
She turns her left arm green to spite him. He uncaps the paint
Thinner. She gathers saliva beneath her tongue.
He holds still: his brush, a knife;
His breath collapsing.


Poetry Friday is hosted this week by HipWriterMama.