NaPoWriMo Day 8: Finders Keepers

It’s Sunday. I think we should take the day off. Just kidding! But … you don’t need to write a poem today, just find one. Happy poem hunting! Here’s your (optional) daily poetry prompt:

Found Poem. Find a book of science or mathematics or some other technical or legal document and locate a found poem. See if you can give it an interesting title that changes the meaning of the text, like Jane Hirschfield did with her poem “Global Warming.” I once heard Hirschfield read this poem and she explained that she found the text nearly verbatim in a history book. Her title shifts it completely into a different, modern context.

If you don’t find a passage you like just as it is, try mixing up lines or phrases, even individual words. According to the American Academy of Poet’s definition of the form, “a pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.” But it also notes that poets can take individual lines, phrases, or words and rearrange them in a sort of poetic collage. In the end, how much you “find” and how much you create is up to you. Just be sure to attribute any borrowed material to its source.

Here are two poems I found in an old medical text. The titles are my own.

Outrage

“The first attenuation is
one-tenth the strength
of the mother tincture,
the second attenuation,
one-tenth the strength
of the first, and so on,
each attenuation being
just one-tenth the strength
of the one preceding.”

(quoted material is from instructions for the preparation
of homeopathic remedies, 1895 edition of The Cottage Physician)

Witnessing Injustice

“Sometimes the palpitations
are loud and clear and regular;
at others they are faint and intermittent;
now a distant throb, or several,
and then a tremulous flutter,
or a quick beat, like the wings
of a confined bird flapping
against the bars of its prison.”

(quoted material is from a discussion of heart
palpitations, 1895 edition of The Cottage Physician)