Found Poetry

I've begun to write poetry again. There has been a long gap. I haven't really written poetry since before I became ill.

Significantly, the first two poems that I wrote were about my illness. Both these poems are heavy with metaphor: the shadow and the sand-storm representing the experience of being in the thrall of the illness.

With these poems I was reflecting on where I had been. They were written from a different place. During the illness I could only write prose.

Over the past week I've written three new poems. Each of these has been a 'found poem': a new poem that is created from an existing text. The new poem is created by taking words and phrases (sometimes whole passages) from another source and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning.

The poems I've written this week have come from materials that arrived in the mail, texts which I would ordinarily have discarded: a promotional leaflet from a printing company, a letter accompanying my new bank card, a leaflet about recycling.

I began this process the day I received a card from a photographer friend. Terry had made a pinhole camera from an empty cocoa tin and had sent me a picture he had produced with it. He said, 'the appeal for me is being able to make images with stuff that would end up in recycling or landfill'.

I'm following Terry's excellent example by making poetry from similar materials. This is also a reversal, the making of poetry from mundane prose that had been created for another purpose. And an affirmation that creative possibilities are everywhere, if we only have the ability to look with fresh eyes.