Found Poetry Exercise 2
Participants
Neal Whitman
/NW
Shanna Baldwin Moore /SBM
Linda Papanicolau /LP
Karina Klesko /KK
Dragons at the Door: Haibun
Daylily - Following the Sun
Daylily - Following the Sun - White
Daylily - Following the Sun - Black
Sijo / Korean Song: Proverbs
Bernard Gieske /BG
Tribute To
Jean Ritchie: Free Verse
John Daleiden /JD
The Interloper Journeys From Page to Page
A Night At The Opera:
Incremental Line Increase
Judith
Gorgone /JG
as big as life: Free Verse
Craig
Tigerman
Objects
in Mirror are Closer than they Appear
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John Daleiden:
Exercise 2: Two sources in a Found Poem
Incremental Increase
A Night At The Opera
...And An
Alternative Version...
Scooping the
Streets
Resources:
Source 1:
Title: "A Night At The Opera" is a borrowed title of
course.
Wikipedia lists the particulars below for
this iconic film:
A Night
at the Opera is a 1935 American comedy film starring
Groucho Marx, Chico Marx and Harpo Marx, and
featuring Kitty Carlisle, Allan Jones, Margaret
Dumont, Sig Ruman, and Walter Woolf King. It was the
first film the Marx Brothers made for
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after their departure from
Paramount Pictures, and the first after Zeppo left
the act. The film was adapted by George S. Kaufman,
Morrie Ryskind, Al Boasberg (uncredited), and Buster
Keaton (uncredited) from a story by James Kevin
McGuinness. Most of the physical gags were wholly
lifted from Keaton's 1932 film Speak Easily. It was
directed by Sam Wood.
In 1993,
"A Night at the Opera" was selected for preservation
in the United States National Film Registry by the
Library of Congress as being "culturally,
historically, or aesthetically significant".
Source 2:
(¦bel ¦shÄpt
′kərv) [bell shaped curve]
(statistics) The curve representing a continuous
frequency distribution with a shape having the
overall curvature of the vertical cross section of a
bell; usually applied to the normal distribution.
~McGraw-Hill Science & Technology Dictionary:
bell-shaped curve
Read more:
http://www.answers.com/topic/bell-shaped-curve#ixzz1jssizaNo
Source 3:
"Oh,
easy for Leonardo!"
A Child's Christmas in Wales
by Dylan Thomas.
Leonardo
Da Vinci was certainly no stranger to the use codes
and encryption. His notes are all written backwards
with "mirror" writing. It is unclear exactly why
Leonardo did this. The Dylan Thomas reference in the
short story is possibly about Leonardo's well known
secret practices. In both the poem and the short
story the remark is both cryptic and sarcastic.
Source 4:
a familiar and popular quotation:
"It's not over until the fat
lady sings".
It ain't
over till (or until) the fat lady sings is a
colloquialism, essentially meaning that one should
not assume the outcome of some activity (e.g. a
sporting contest) until it has actually finished,
similar to a common proverb. It is a perception of
Grand Opera, with its stereotypically overweight
sopranos.
Its use
in sports journalism has been attributed to
writer/broadcaster Dan Cook; his original line was
"The opera ain't over till the fat lady sings."
This occurred in April 1978, when he used
the phrase after the first basketball game between
the San Antonio Spurs and the Washington Bullets
(now the Washington Wizards) during the 1977–1978
National Basketball Association playoffs, to
illustrate that while the Spurs had won once, the
series was not over yet.
The
imagery of Richard Wagner's opera suite Der Ring des
Nibelungen and its last part, Götterdämmerung, is
typically the one used in depictions accompanying
reference to the phrase. The "fat lady" is the
valkyrie Brünnhilde, who is traditionally presented
as a very buxom lady with horned helmet, spear and
round shield (although Brünnhilde actually wears a
winged helmet[citation needed]). Her aria lasts
almost twenty minutes and leads directly to the end
of the opera, though the character Hagen has one
final line, "Zurück vom Ring!", to sing after
Brünnhilde's death, and there is also a substantial
orchestral finale.[3] As Götterdämmerung is about
the end of the world (or at least the world of the
Norse gods), in a very significant way "it is [all]
over when the fat lady sings."
The four
operas in Wagner's Ring Cycle is a work of
extraordinary scale. Perhaps the most outstanding
facet of the monumental work is its sheer length: a
full performance of the cycle takes place over four
nights at the opera, with a total playing time of
about 15 hours
Wikipedia
Author
Comments:
The
Incremental Increase Found Poem, "A Night At The Opera"
uses several techniques. First, the entire poem is cast
as an image. This places an emphasis on the graphic
element, often omitted from earlier Found Poem
literature. The graphic image of the Bell curve is
superimposed over the central word image of the poem.
The words of the poem are displayed as a mirror
image—enigmatically the reverse; the mirror image is
presented first, and is of course the most difficult
part to read since it is contrary to the traditional
notion of writing. The traditional left to right word
image is presented on the right.
The second element of this found poem is the words which
have been directly transferred from an essay on Found
Poetry published by The Academy of American poets at
Poets.org:
Poetic Form: Found
Poem.
The short essay is included with this document (see
below); the yellow highlighting indicates the exact
words and portions that have been re-ordered into the
text of a new poem.
A third element of this found poem is the use of
pastiche, a literary artistic genre or technique
that is a "hodge-podge" or imitation. The word is a
linguistic term used to describe an early stage in the
development of a pidgin language. In this usage, a work
is called a pastiche if it is cobbled together in
imitation of several original works. As the Oxford
English Dictionary puts it, a pastiche in this
sense is "a medley of various ingredients; a hotchpotch,
farrago, jumble." This meaning accords with etymology:
pastiche is the French version of the Greco-Roman dish
pastitsio or pasticcio, a kind of pie made of many
different ingredients.
A fourth
element in this found poem is the verse format. This
Incremental Increase poem is based on the concept of
syllable counting. Note that sequential numbers
from 0 through 10 are placed after the last word of each
line; these numbers also represent the number of
syllables in each line. Additionally ,the spaced
and resulting curvature of the shape of the lines
resembles the bell shaped curve--an image superimposed
on the poem.
Source for
text of the new poem:
Found poems take existing
texts and
refashion them,
reorder them,
and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a
collage, found poetry is often made from
newspaper
articles, street
signs,
graffiti,
speeches,
letters, or even other poems.
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.
Examples of found poems can be seen in the work of
Blaise Cendrars, David Antin, and Charles Reznikoff. In
his book Testimony, Reznikoff created
poetry from law reports, such as this excerpt:
Amelia was just fourteen and out of the orphan
asylum; at her
first job--in the bindery, and yes sir, yes
ma'am, oh, so
anxious to please.
She stood at the table, her blond hair hanging
about her
shoulders, "knocking up" for Mary and Sadie, the
stichers
("knocking up" is counting books and stacking
them in piles to
be taken away).
Many poets
have also chosen to incorporate
snippets
of found texts
into
larger poems, most significantly Ezra
Pound.
His Cantos includes
letters written by
presidents and
popes, as well as an array of official documents
from governments
and banks.
The Waste
Land, by T. S. Eliot, uses many different
texts, including Wagnerian opera, Shakespearian theater,
and Greek mythology. Other poets who
combined
found elements
with their
poetry are William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and
Louis Zukofsky.
The found
poem achieved
prominence in the twentieth-century, sharing many traits
with Pop Art,
such as Andy Warhol's
soup cans
or Marcel Duchamp's
bicycle wheels
and urinals. The writer Annie Dillard has said that
turning a text into a poem doubles that poem's context.
"The original meaning remains intact," she writes, "but
now it swings
between two
poles."
The Academy
of American poets at Poets.org:
Poetic Form: Found
Poem.
Examples of
Found Poems:
A plain text
rendering of the poem:
A Night At The Opera
0
texts, 1
speeches, 2
graffiti,
3
newspapers, signs— 4
refashioned snippets 5
combined and reordered— 6
the waste land pounded into
7
Pop Art soup cans, bicycle wheels— 8
presidents, popes, governments and banks— 9
the found elements swing between two poles
10
foundpoetrystudio Post Nos. 63, 66, 71, 73, 74,
75,76,77, 96
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/foundpoetrystudio/messages
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John Daleiden:
Exercise 2: Two sources in a Found Poem
Incremental Increase
A Night At The Opera
The Task: Write a found Poem using any two
or more sources selected by the author.
Be sure to identify your
sources; for each source include title, author, publisher,
and / or an on-line link if one is available.
Title your poem.
Be sure to save a copy of
your poem to your own computer; then post to the
foundpoetrystudio.
Definition Material:
From
Poets.org:
Found poems take existing
texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as
poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is
often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti,
speeches, letters, or even other poems.
and
from
Wikipedia:
Found poetry is a type of
poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole
passages from other sources and re-framing them as poetry by
making changes in spacing and/or lines (and consequently
meaning), or by altering the text by additions and/or
deletions. The resulting poem can be defined as either
treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or
untreated (verbatim): virtually unchanged from the order,
syntax and meaning of the original.
Posting / Submission:
Post to the
foundpoetrystudio at this link:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/foundpoetrystudio/
- click post
- select rich-text
format
- paste in your
document or type in your document
- format your document
- PROOF READ YOUR
DOCUMENT -- this is very important!
- send your document
- respond to feedback
List of Resources:
The Found Poetry Review:
an on-line journal
http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/about
This
quarterly on-line journal provides good definitions of
"found poetry", examples, and a fair use standard.
They publish found poetry,
centos, erasure poems and other forms that incorporate
elements of existing texts.
Read Examples of Found
Poems:
The Found Poetry Review:
http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/fall-2011
Sketchbook: A
Journal for Eastern and Western Short Forms:
Found Poem Contest
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