Found Poetry - Verbatim!
I never imagined that I would be writing another blog post so quickly, however, I discovered something amazing last night and have to tell the world...or at least the four or five people who might stumble upon my website or this blog...about it!
Verbatim Poetry (see below for ways to find them) is an online magazine featuring works of found poetry. What you may ask is "found poetry"? Well, essentially, it's the cultivation of poems made up of words found in the everyday milieu. Maybe a collection of Post-it notes on a desk or the names of cereal brands on the shelves at the grocery or even an excerpt from an instruction manual rearranged to make a poem. The idea seems to be finding these hidden poems and then altering them as little as possible to produce something poetic. Maybe merely adjusting the punctuation or capitalization.
I became so enthralled with the idea, at nine o'clock last night, that this sleep with the sun/up with the sun creature stayed awake to play for...well, way too long?!?! Hence my slightly sleep-deprived loopiness at the moment. I'm telling you this is a seriously addictive game of wordsmithing. A literary art form like no other. Don't say I didn't warn you!
Craigslist postings became the primary source of my raw poetic clay. I found two particularly excellent ads - one selling a vase, one a canvas art print. Then used the search results list from "Hope" in the personals section for my third concoction. So much fun that I went ahead and submitted them to Verbatim Poetry! Who knows if they'll actually publish them but I had a blast creating them.
I've decided not to post them here for fear that Verbatim might not run them, if they've been previously published...even just on my silly, little blog. You'll just have to stay tuned and as soon as I know something, I'll blog about it. Promise.
Verbatim Poetry can be found on Twitter as @verbatimpoetry or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/VerbatimPoetry/.
