New Poetry

Today is Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub. Head on over to read a diverse selection of poetry and share a poem of your own.

Yesterday, while looking at New Pages and planning submissions, I happened upon a call for found poetry from Heron Tree. The call is to create found poetry from works published before 1927. I hopped up and grabbed my copy of More Fairy Stories Every Child Should Know: Magic Casements edited by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora Archibald Smith and published in 1907. I found this lovely treasure in an antique store a long time ago and have not spent enough time with it. I was inspired by this call for submissions to dive into the book and interact with it in new ways.

I did a little research, and it turns out that Kate and Nora were sisters. Kate is best known as the author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but she also was an educator that started many kindergartens in and around San Francisco. I tried to find out more about my book and the series it was a part of “What Every Child Should Know Library,” but the only thing I came up with was a Project Gutenberg digital copy of one of the other books in the series, Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know.

After reading some of the past issues of Heron Tree, I realized that there is an area of found poetry I haven’t tried: fitting to form. I enjoy trying poetry forms each year during NaPoWriMo and OctPoWriMo, and the form challenges from dVerse Poets Pub, but I have never tried a form with cut-ups or collage poems.

I have photocopied the preface of the book and a few of the stories to get started on my quest for found poetry. Along with blackouts, cut-ups and collages, I’m going to try fitting my found words and phrases into some of my favorite forms.

That was time consuming, but fun. I started trying some Cinquains, but liked the repeated line of the Quatern. I found the repeating line amusing.

Happy Reading and Writing!