Issue #110
Meg Freer
| Found poems are unique in that poets do not write them from scratch. Instead, they are discovered in other works and, one way or another, arranged into poetry. Canada’s John Robert Colombo traces the first found poem in English to Yeats, who, as editor of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), included a “versified” prose fragment from a Walter Pater essay. In his introduction to F.R. Scott’s 1967 collection of found poetry, Trouvailles: Poems from Prose, Louis Dudek described the form as “a piece of realistic literature, in which significance appears inherent in the object — either as extravagant absurdity or as unexpected worth.” As Scott’s “Pavilion Misrepresents Outlook” shows, found poetry can be an excellent platform for protest as well as for irony (saying one thing but meaning the opposite). Colombo, Scott, and Dorothy Livesay were the first Canadian poets to explore the possibilities of found poetry. The first two focused mainly on re-arranging existing texts with minimal intervention, while Livesay (and, later, others such as Michael Ondaatje and Daphne Marlatt) created what Franz Stanzel calls “documentary literature, employing historical or social documents a literature.” Since then, found poetry has gone in many directions and now includes everything from collage to erasure poetry. As Shane Rhodes points out, today we can “… conceptualize found poetry along an axis that ranges from non-interventionist at one extreme … to the other end where the found text is doctored, and ‘poeticized,’ and, perhaps, included within a larger unfound structure.” Representing one end of the spectrum, Scott’s poems are examples of the non- interventionist approach, where poems are created by inserting line breaks in otherwise unchanged passages from a larger text. Brian Bartlett’s “What He Chose to Record,” part of a sequence of found poems, is a documentary/collage, which gathers together fragments from a variety of East Coast historical sources, including diaries, letters newspapers, and books. “The art of writing these poems,” Bartlett explains, “is one of radical selection, concentration, and free rearrangement.” At the other end of the spectrum, Jordan Abel’s poem is an example of erasure poetry, which deletes passages from an original text — in this case, the book Totem Poles by anthropologist Maurice Barbeau. Abel also often leaves the retained words in the same position as on the original page, giving a kind of breathlessness and pause to the new text. M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Zong! #24” is another example of erasure poetry, but she combines hers with collage and documentary. For her book Zong!,s a long poem about the 1781 deaths of 150 Africans who’d been thrown overboard from a slave ship, she “locked” herself into a legal report about the incident, much as the slaves had been “locked” on the ship. She then “fractured and fragmented,” and “murdered” the text, “finding” her poems “in different places on the page,” and leaving large amounts of white space, “as if they need to breathe.” She later began to break down words to find other words. As she says, “I use the text of the legal report almost as a painter uses paint or a sculptor stone.” Another kind of found poem, the cento, has a very long history. J.A. Cuddon, in The Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, calls it a “collection of bits and pieces from various writers.” He quotes an early practitioner of the form, Decimus Magnus Ausonius (circa AD 310–90), who described the cento as a poem of hexameter lines created by a complex combination of full and/or half-lines borrowed from one poet or many. Modern centos tend to be — as poet Mary Dalton says — “collage pieces… woven together as a form of tribute,” that can make, “on one level, a little anthology.” Any number of approaches can be used to gather and piece together the borrowed lines. Here, Maureen Hynes uses sometimes single, sometimes multiple lines from twenty- four poems by eighteen poets to create hers. |
Note: Erasure poem based on Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve, eds., In Fine Form: A
Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry, 2 nd ed. (Caitlin Press, 2016), “Found Poetry,”
introduction, pp. 52-53. Highlight poem for context.
Meg Freer works in the arts in Ontario. She has published poems, photos, and prose in journals and four chapbooks. Recent poems are in Blood+Honey and Rat’s Ass Review. Her free Substack blog Finding the Colors highlights other published work that uncovers unexpected meaning in the world’s beauty and strangeness.
John Schneider
Hide and Seek
You think it’s forever. The way a cloud-
strewn day unfolds helplessly into night,
then dissipates. How the few remaining stars
from childhood leave our skies cold, too grown
to recognize the prayers we once hung from them,
no longer reachable with steepled hands as we become
both more and less than what we had envisioned.
*
When I look out this living room window now,
I notice uncurtained scenes of someone else’s
childhood. A bit too familiar, these wide-eyed children
beating hide and seek into the tall grass beneath
a live oak tree. Pirating, bloodlessly, with torn-
off branches. Joyfully chanting olly olly oxen free,
as if they’ll be called home, safely, forever.
As if all mysteries endure, hymns never
get stuck in your throat.
*
This time of year, the sharpening trees
webbed in both fading and renewal
almost feel attainable. And, briefly,
you think it’s forever again. That tiny
voice still humming itself wild inside.
Remembering those old melodies, like stars,
like the prayers still dangling loosely from them,
back from when what you couldn’t touch
you could simply imagine there, unfolding.
John Schneider is author of Swallowing the Light (2022), a Pinnacle Best Book Poetry winner, NYC Big Book Distinguished Favorite, and forthcoming, And Our Bodies Again Make Sense. He is a multiple award winning poet, most recently winner of the Milton J. Kessler Prize for Poetry. He resides in Berkeley, California.
Michael Getty
Supermoon Dervish Quasi-Ghazal
|
Night found me stumbledrunk on a moon so bright it brought out murmuring colors. A supermoon will do that, sleepwalk greens and yellows from their beds, bruised reds, crowd-shy blues, other moon- shades blinking in astonishment. I remembered 2023, when I was a Muslim-curious tourist in an empty dervish house at moon- rise in Bosnia, the one building besides the cigarette factory that went untouched by the war. Off-season, they let you moon- light as a religious seeker, sit and taste the names of Allah in the air where they fell from believing lips, from Sufis who whirled like the moon around her blue-green love, and in the sideways light he appeared — echo, dream dervish — as the moon rose into the pinkbruised sky and the squinting day remembered his chant — al-Hayy the Living One — as he spun in green-eyed trance like a dizzymoon around an-Nur — the Light — and I watched his pearled robes flare watched his heartsoul fly apart, fall up into the skin of the moon with a cry of al-Alam — the Knowing One — and I tasted my own lovesick tears as dervishmoon- beams filled the mountain air, kissed the empty allspace that is al-Alam, an-Nur, al-Hayy, Allah — Tonight, look up at the moon. See the dervishshards— curl of robe, lovebright eye. See light worship Light and understand a supermoon is how I know he was real, it was all real, and it’s his moon now if it’s anyone’s |
Michael Getty is a writer who lives with his husband in St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in publications such as Willows Wept Review, Space and Time, and Minyan Magazine.
Beverley Sylvester
After the Rain
|
Fly covered frog body bakes on steamy asphalt, buzzing with decay cicadas sing-hum their raspy cigarette throat declaration: happy birthday to me, emerged again shiny and new and shedding damp mulch sweats hazy summer sweetness, smelling of pine and drifting ever upwards with the heat the bullfrog throws his voice across the lake, a sound too big from his small body (piece of God) to be anything but miracle the magnolias drink up sunlight like corn liquor and sweet tea, while determined squash sprouts push up through damp soil, and I think of death — how tonight I will walk barefoot in dewy grass moonwild and full of some clay unformed but forming itself slowly into sculpture that I want so desperately to be prophesy (it’s not) and I will marvel at the mystic standing between the promise of one-day Heaven and the Heaven under our porous skin. Someday I will have a garden full of dahlias and a vase of sunflowers in my kitchen. Today I have the mushrooms and the turkey vultures turning loss into nourishment. Really, these are the same thing: a small reminder in this world on fire that the smell of a Georgia summer is ancient and holy and maybe my whole reason for being is just to inhale. |
Beverley Sylvester is a writer, composer, dramaturg, and musician. Her writing has received the Artistine Mann Award in Playwriting and the New South Young Playwrights Award, among other recognitions. Her poetry has been published in humana obscura, Yellow Arrow Journal, Silly Goose Press, ONE ART, and more.
Kartik Yadav
The Unfed Guest
This gilded canker, dressed in “Almost Light,”
dines on the marrow of the pulse it kills;
it offers vast horizons to the sight
to freeze the hand that labor’s earth fulfills.
I crouch before the Gate, a breathing wall,
the clerk who keeps the ledger of his dread,
too grand to rise, too terrified to fall,
I gulp the gale and starve for solid bone.
I am a spiteful thing: a hollow flute
that mocks the breath of God for being brief,
I laud the blossom, let the sap go mute,
and wring a holy nectar from my grief.
For “Someday” is a debt I cannot pay,
a ghost that drinks the blood of “Here” and “Am”,
the Wolf of Greatness leads the soul astray
to slaughter the existing, quiet lamb.
Oh, smash the jar! Let sour vintage run,
a jagged shard is truer than the void.
I hid within the shadow of the sun,
and by the Unborn Self, I am destroyed.
The Friend is found in sweat, in dust, in scars,
not in the “Might Have Been” we hoard like gold,
better a guttering lamp than imagined stars,
and a life that is lived than a story merely told.
Kartik Yadav is a 16 year old student from India.
Phillip Guillen II
Heritage
|
“To me, the hallway led to my bed. For the poet who would stand in the corner and watch me play, who would fall over and crawl down the hallway into the shadows and short ceilings, who knows? Mamá would say ghosts stick around to search for people. You know, rooms lead off from themselves until you find yourself in hot days just like this one. But shhh, don’t tell anyone, because I’ve got the shade of this tree. This old tree and swing. This is Goya’s tree, did you know that? I made love to him in that decrepit hut built on the fringes of war. Every time after, he’d stand up and splatter the walls and howl at his reflection to ¡Déjame! ¡Déjame! ¡Déjame en paz! while I’d stand in the corner and laugh and watch him, because he had already etched his tree of disasters. He’d already charted what it means to tie a man to Earth’s soul and pull until only scattered limbs are left to hang along the branches of a history so indifferent and still that it might not be real. And he thought he had seen the worst of it. He didn’t know. When my family came north the land was so empty you could see centuries out. I even saw an old pyramid. I even saw my descendents charting a million mile parable through the desert. They were on a pilgrimage to the hermit, you know the one who still purportedly lives somewhere on the horizon and has still refused the pleading of angels to travel back into the world. Or maybe she has died. Maybe she did take all of her medicines back. Do you know? Anyway, one of my descendents in that line who, you know actually, looked a lot like you, raised a lonely hand and waved at me, and when I waved back, the lonely hand hooked into itself and gnarled into a ball of root and soil and right there before us all burst open into water. Water. Synonym for life. But you do know, don’t you, that life doesn’t mean Rio Grande is a synonym for truth? It’s just—” she would talk about the river a lot when she couldn’t remember our names, “a cut, a thin scar. Look here, I got this one trying to reach through the Rio Grande after my brother threw a brick through it and so it was my job to reach in and open the door to that abandoned church on the corner. Our laughs would echo down the hallways and run away, just like a river. You know that’s what I mean, don’t you? It’s a child’s job to give life to the empty and abandoned places that plague us. Just like water. Laughing water. Laughing water. It was my laughing that brought the poet back every time, every time the poet would leave. Searching. Shadows. Short ceilings. The poet always returned, but always alone. I think, one day, we all forget. And for that we continue to return.” |
Phillip Guillen II is a young poet from Texas and a graduate of the University of North Texas. His work has previously appeared in The North Texas Review. To read more work by the author, please visit ,a href=”https://www.phillipguillenii.com”>www.phillipguillenii.com, or the author’s instagram page, @2ndsubconscious.
M. Brooke Wiese
Reflection
|
What is is reflected there — your face. Demons inside and out, through you, past your splattered, rent clothing, brain rattled blooming bruise this cannot touch. Calamity! Foul, most anxious, our eyes, lips, nose, brows, tear-stained face, fabric ripped in two. There you are, you of “two is one” and once you, your face only you face only your face you face. |
Is what is there reflected? Face your demons, out and inside you, through your past: clothing rent, splattered, rattled brain, bruise blooming, touch cannot… This, our anxious most foul calamity. Browse nose, lips, eyes, face stained. Tear in ripped fabric — Are you there? Two of you one is two and you won, only face your face, you face your only face. You. |
M. Brooke Wiese’s work has appeared recently in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Burningword, Persimmon Tree, Snakeskin, New Lyre, and Poets for Science. Her second chapbook is available from Finishing Line Press, and her third is now out from Bottlecap Press. Brooke teaches at a special education school to high school students of all abilities. www.mbrookewiese.net
G. Finlayson Boswell
Sonnets for a West Los Angeles Derelict
I.
Within our sewer drains there is a ghost
unlike those pale and wispy shades across
the iced Atlantic Sea; and unlike Christ
upon his selfless cross, but still a gust
of harsh, malignant wind assails his face
and lean corpse with scores of open scars
that we might soon forgive the thought his sores
were more than absolution’s artifice.
He is a demon, product of our waste,
of our excess and decadence of breath
that passes here for atmosphere. The worst
of human thought he swims in is a bath
of petrochemicals, and what he’s wished
he might soon get: a bloody, soiled rebirth.
II.
Now, there erupts his pestilence and grit,
malformed and aching, twisting like a sheet
of ragged fabric dredged from a stream of shit,
and thus, pronounces loud the age of graft,
that pyramid a hierophantic class
once quickened, now allowing in a team
of epigones and scramblers. For his time,
he cherishes contempt he won’t disclose;
but there it is, described in this wet mess
that he’s produced through trembling in the mud
and shaking off the insect-creeping moss.
And what a thing is this! To spy, amid
this roaring contortion, ecstasy amass-
ing, and with its coming, savagery of mind.
Tim Strzechowski
butterflies
A kaleidoscope
of fluttery blinks,
vivid delicate brilliance,
each pattern its own unique
tableau of precious artistry to admire.
What sophisticated, silken transformation we
come to, complete.
But nostalgia runs deep.
Why must chrysalis days once cherished by all
be now forbidden, judged unrefined?
Why must tastes now deviate
from nectars and juices once savored by all?
Why must each elite wing clapback against wing?
And who would dare deny
whimsies toxic
of the monarchs
who gatekeep
the milkweed?
None, certainly.
So: Awake!
Arise! Become
the
camouflage, the
universal hubbub wild
of
whispered
mimics
unleashed
upon
common
predators,
for we
all must
patrol
wing
patterns and
at times
expel
in shame
those
who
pollinate
with
controversy.
After
all, not all
butterflies
are
a
good
fit.
Tim Strzechowski is a writer and artist living in the PNW. His poetry has appeared in Verses from the Underground, Spank the Carp, Poet in Verse Journal, and We Speak for Peace: An Anti-War Anthology. His art has been featured in The Holland Files.
Nels Hanson
100 Blossoms
late summer, 2024
In trouble with the law
you can run for President
and if you win they can’t
touch you for at least four
years the analyst on cable
said. The 100 blossoms of
my Rose of Sharon’s bent
branches fade from pink-
lavender to sapphire, to
ghostly silver the color of
wedding gifts. Years ago
at a party I heard people
long dead now explaining
who I really was but after
everything was put away
the blurred mirror stayed
the same. Later I caught in
flashback my mirage, stop
action as I ran from there
to here, all these dry petals
scattered in place of blooms
that never took in this poor
country, poor world. Once
again I walked alone a stony
riverbank beyond the fallen
horse the weather and time
were taking below Piedra.
I saw my face in the Kings’
blue water purling still an
instant before I grew taller
than I am or was, a ripple
washing glass clear again.
I was happy, glad, certain
my reflection disappearing
meant a river keeps flowing
past anyone’s life or death.
Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher and editor. His fiction received the James D. Phelan Award from the San Francisco Foundation, and his poetry the Prospero Prize from Sharkpack Review.
Annette Sisson
Filling in the Bare Spots
~ Atlanta Botanical Gardens
Through tall trees, profusions of roses,
azaleas, hydrangeas, we stroll the raised
walkways above the slopes. This morning
I miss my son’s family, tethered to home,
new baby’s arrival just weeks away—
but the blossoms ease my thoughts
of the vacant room at our holiday rental.
Here in the gardens, leafy hills open
suddenly to clearing: A colossal metal
sculpture, Earth Goddess, rises three
full stories, waist to head, her tunic, skin,
hair—all plants, smooth and knurled,
umber, olive, gold and lime. Her eyes,
cast down, meditate on her hand, water
spilling between index finger and thumb
to the pond which undulates against her torso.
We hadn’t expected her. We gaze, transfixed
by her flowing plaits, her layered texture—
a few blank patches, too, in early season.
I photograph her from the front, picture
how she’ll look in July, then August,
thick-browed, ambered. I snap her
from the side, ponder autumn’s withering,
first features to fade. Already I long
to view her again, to see the spaces fill in,
lush and full as fleece. And after, to witness
the return of bare spots—her mouth thinned,
shoulders bowed, languishing. We move on
to orchids, ramble back to the oversized
Vrbo. But her sleek form follows me—
patterns, changes, face calm as dew,
affirming the impossibility of holding water:
it slips away even while you watch.
Annette Sisson’s poems appear in Penn Review, Birmingham PR, Rust + Moth, Cutleaf, and others. Her second book, Winter Sharp with Apples, was published by Terrapin Books (2024), and her third manuscript, Rhizomes and Bones, was runner-up in the 2025 Cider Press Book Award. She won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s prize.