July Monthly Mini Workshop: Monday July 5, 2021. We do a monthly “mini workshop” online using zoom before the Lehigh valley Poetry Salon, on the first Monday of the month from 8:00 PM EST-8:30 PM EST. These are typically short prompts, reflections, techniques, and generative exercises. For more information and some background, please check out this page. Facilitated by E. Lynn Alexander, host of the Lehigh Valley Poetry Salon and Open Mic.
July’s Mini Workshop will be about FOUND POETRY. What is “found poetry”? This is what the web tells us:
Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them (a literary equivalent of a collage) by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning.
What it means to YOU is up to you. This can be a creative way to explore words and themes with your writing. We will take a look at a few examples.
Blackout Poetry
Text Collage
Altered
Cento
Other examples that you can think of?
Exercise: Found Poetry of Place- Text In Your Environment
Take a few minutes with the camera off. Walk around your home and look for sections of text. A magazine page, book page, box from the pantry… it doesn’t matter as long as there are words that you can use. Part of this is to challenge creativity. But don’t overthink it.
If you can, take a reference photo with your phone. We will be practicing the exercise of crafting a short line or poem using found words.
Below, I took the first book that I saw an opened up to a random page. It was “Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals” by Maggie Estep. The second was a study guide from a drawer, AP United States Government and Politics. I happened to open up to a page on Citizens United.
I looked for some words that jumped out at me: “out of the house” “the kid was bad news”. I didn’t want to think about kids and bad news.
The house was bad news
A suspect
Arson fires
Cut loose
Freedom to associate-determination-such communication
