Found Poem #9: Endeavoring to Answer Your Letter

Posted by Angela Severson on Apr 24, 2012 in Found Poetry | 1 comment

For Kansas Boy

I stare at the postage stamp.
It marks a price on your last letter,
a conglomerate of sentiments,
ideas and musings.

I reimagine this notion
of deploying protesting farmers
from grasslands to mountain regions,
Riding their small tractors-
sweat pooling in their brows,
carrying Pepsi Cola to wet the throat
as they announce their spartan, all unnecessary frills stripped out, message.

“Standing still is not an option!
Farmers of America WAKE UP!
We are being squeezed out by the fish!
Yes, they have a comprehensive plan
to circumvent our fields, take over the farmlands.
They’ve hyped it as “Oceans Are Righteous”
and their message is flourishing.
In fact there is a small group of
farmers in California who have taken to heart
this clever improvisational plan.
It is now a hit and
this trend will surely accelerate.

My fellow farmers, let us
herald a “fresh as manure” agenda.
I am confident we will device a frugal yet clever innovation
to let these fish know
we are as indispensable as stethoscopes.”

Kansas Boy,
I am without words.

All my best,

Scando Girl

Source Title: Asian innovation: Frugal ideas are spreading from East to West
Author: Schumpeter
Magazine: The Economist
Found: 1605 NE Broadway, Portland, OR, 97232, inside of a magazine basket

Found Poem #8: Psyche Dreams

Posted by Lic Eric-o Chavez on Apr 13, 2012 in Found Poetry | 0 comments

Spontaneous products, fantastic trappings
Of psychic manifestations serve nature
Emanating from primeval dreams
“Disguised” advice to check the flow
Escape the analyst and the analyzed
Looking for some incompatible wish of mine
Dialectical exchange handled as a mechanical technique
Depersonalized social milieu
When they are unaware of their own type
Assailed by secret doubts of human behavior
An amazingly stupid way
“Feeling” in contrast to “thinking”
Distortions in the conscious mind
The “shadow side”
Unconsciously playing an insane game
The dream is a guardian of sleep
Subliminal contents of the psyche
Vaguely analogous toxins
Come close to the threshold of consciousness
Ceases to be a dream
A total eclipse of the sun
Flower neglect, profitable feeling of worthlessness
Plunge into infantile events
And fantasies, metaphysical speculations absurd to interpret
My mind
This hazard
His greatest trouble
Spontaneous impulses to consciousness…

Author: Lic. Eric-o Chavez
Source: Article about dream interpretation, psychoanalysis and Freud
Location: El Paso, TX

Found Poem #7: The Game

Posted by Christine Fojas on Apr 13, 2012 in Found Poetry | 2 comments

Your cracked hands catch
——What the poet throws you:
————A matter-of-fact measured line,

A primitive impulse,
——A sound loosed
————From a sense
——————Of structures

And marks the end of margins
——That evoke
————Each encounter.
——————Some tender oh.

You may miss more than once
——But come to it
————By different trains at night,
——————At the poet’s arrangement.

Get entangled in the tossing waves,
——Underlining the slight pauses
——————Of a damaged text
——With details that support
————————Rather than define.

Does subsequent readings reveal
——Our own rhythmic screams?
————This is a poetry splintering spread.

Listen for the words
——That hang from my head
————In badly organized chains.

Eventually
——You can fill in the missing faces.

But poems are not to be mounted.
——They come alive
————In the cadence of pleasure.

Allow yourself this vividness.
——Now this particular phrase.
————And whatever makes itself apparent
——In sweet revelation
————And bursts from my navel.
——————The game is clear enough.

And we’ll inhabit
——A mythical world of Tuesdays
————That the poet creates for the fool
——And that the fool performs
————For the poet.

This is an unfamiliar circle.
——The center in mind
————Is you.

Author: Christine Fojas
Source: Book, Reading and Writing about Poetry
Location: Surrey, British Columbia, Canada

Found Poem #6: Eight Stone Diaries

Posted by KPan on Apr 10, 2012 in Found Poetry | 0 comments

Ease is only twenty-two years old
Tenderly sheltered, sometimes uneven
A bag of buried language
This strange dry dizziness
A persistent buzzing noise
And a corner-of-the-eye glimpse of bees’ wings
Blurred spheres of sound
The immense stored heat of the planet
The muzziness of blocked memory
Tunnel out of childhood!
There is something careless about this kind of forgetting
Most people need an envelope in which to concentrate their thoughts
A choice its force separated from pain
What treasure was this?
He’d buried the box in the earth
Her wedding ring
Her dead finger
Mercy, hold me in your soft arms
Cover me with your warm body
Keep me warm
Everything hollow
So consecrated to the blur of the future
Two lost fathers a ribbon of laughter
Into the present tense
The rain a rhyme full of heartbeats
A lurch of love
The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves
We are always damping down our inner weather
The sun on the rocks
A primitive flower
She has said nothing
A milky film over his irises
The wanderer a cocoon of sheets
She walks freely out the door
She is young and strong again

Author: KPan
Location: Lower East Side, NYC
Source: Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries, Chapter 8: Ease, 1977

Found Poem #5: Connect to Your Generation

Posted by MarieGwen on Apr 10, 2012 in Found Poetry | 1 comment

Who the fuck is ranting?
The damaged by years kids,
The indie-minded purists,
The impishly belligerent artists
Only a few have the talent and hubris.

Call for revolt? Call verbosely for sanity?
It sounds like Ethel Merman deflowering a Commodore 64.
This stance may seem utterly seditious but far-reaching analogies don’t digress
so much as loop through distant metaphorical cosmos,
Odd bits of futurism,
Manifestos nailed in church

Pop-culture pundits,
Lashed out email buddies,
Connecting with other human beings is not your forte,
Connecting with other human beings is not my forte.

Found Poem #4: Rasselas Found

Posted by Kevin Shlosberg on Apr 6, 2012 in Found Poetry | 1 comment

i read all the poets of Persia and Arabia
and found that no man was ever great
——by imitation.
i have long believed that tenderness must be spacious,
——the superstitious are often melancholy,
——the same number cannot be even and odd.
philosophers are easily deceived.
——little can be said,
————things steal away.

what experiment planned opinion
——and made mind scarcely possible?
a thousand questions about the necessity of sleep,
but when the sage finds that you are not
——what you seemed
every month drops fruits, chills,
——wearied attention to the crab’s mitigated fervors.
the cause of his uneasiness pouring upon this country,
——i cannot recall anything he uttered.

i discover within me no power.
yesterday weary visits from women.
they came again and again.
——each knew much:
endless calculations and fluid conversation,
all the minute details of a domestic day;
though the illusions of one
——are not of the other.

with the inheritance of the sun,
——i thought myself honored.
i have left the world to return to Abissinia.

Author: Kevin Shlosberg
Location: San Jose, CA
Source: Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas (available online)

Found Poem #3: Evening

Posted by Kaitlyn D on Apr 4, 2012 in Found Poetry | 2 comments

On a rainy October day,
Inside the tangle of buildings
The light had softened.
The mood was beautiful that evening –
The atmosphere with those strong blue colors all around,
And it’s so exquisite it hurts.
In this Jaded city,
Cynicism is so easy.
Yet the beauty is found in its time of tranquility,
In its authenticity.
It’s the dark, secretive side
That snares the imagination.
And if you listen closely,
You can almost hear the sound
Of tears falling when someone stands in that view
For the very first time
And is overwhelmed by all that beauty.

Author: Kaitlyn D.
Source: “5 Beautiful Reasons to Love Venice” from Budget Travel