Love this idea! Can anyone figure out the source of my blackout poem?

you seem to weave
you try to hit
I'm not sure why
I always miss
I don't know how
I do, without any notions

you absolutely try
you are
you feel
I suppose
I didn't start
I was bored of myself
I started writing
I still do that
I've found that
you think
you're revealing

you're not writing
you're writing
I've also read
you decide what goes where
I don't always know
I sometimes pick
I sometimes write
I have a story
you could only impart

Go forth boldly

Thanks for the awesome link! I am doing this soon, and will try and get my three daughters involved. One can only imagine what poetry will ensue!

Robert - what a cool link! It reminds me a little of the old magnet poetry days, and more than a little of some pasted together kidnapper's ransom notes you see in old black and white movies. I can't wait to give this a try myself. The next couple of weeks sound pretty full for you - when do you sleep?
Sharon Ingraham

Kerri - I have no idea but I love it!

Kerri - yes, it's Robert's interview with Julianna. Well done, makes a terrific poem.

Ha! That's awesome, Kerri!

And Sharon, sleep? Hmm...what's that? :)

Wintersun Festival
(From items in a local paper, the Tweed Sun)

Despite some restrictions
the annual rock'n'roll festival
comes of age. The popular
motorcade parade
and the night car cruises
carry the songstress
back to full throttle.

The arts sector falls
with the current.
Strategy
can be downloaded
when a trio slides in,
captivating. His lap-steel
slide outbursts chill spines.

Trance-like dance effects
over sensual vocals
dish up a mix
of mischief released.
His soaring and thumping
continues to enchant
before moving to reflect.

His wanderings
tell the story people need.
Visit the sound;
last chance to kiss
until next year.
Speaking to the sun,
stay awake.

That one is awesome Kerri! I love this idea and can't wait to get started. We are having a local feud in our little rural community over whether or not to incorporate and I can imagine what I could do with some of the letters to the editor! :-) I will do that soon - in my "spare time."

My first go at this - it's not as easy as I would have thought but I like it and will try some more.

(for Germaine Tillion 1907 – 2008:
anthropologist, hero, sage status, for moral authority and lucid intellect)

What Would Germaine Do?

An anthropologist, lived through
High drama
Arrested by Gestapo
for role in
formation of French Resistance
Charges included could have
led to death
At Ravensbrueck
Designated to disappear
under Hitler’s famous
Nacht and Nebel (night and fog) decree
She survived;
Her mother, picked for hiding
a British airman,
died in gas chamber in 1945;
selected for death
for having white hair.
After the war, Tillion
an important public intellectual
in the 1950’s and 60’s
when thinkers like Aron and Sartre
passionately debated,
she argued
French responsibility to Algerians
She delved into past to recall
“spectres of the Gestapo”
becoming one of first,
loudest voices
to protest French torture
of Algerian prisoners.
Tillion who did not marry,
have children -
wrote an operetta –
“A Camp Worker Goes to Hell”,
while in the concentration camp;
kept in a drawer for 60 years,
Worried “people would get wrong idea,
Think we were enjoying ourselves.”
Sheer darkness of the humour
makes that unlikely,
A character joked that the camp offers
“all the creature comforts – water, gas electricity –
especially gas.”

S.E.Ingraham
May 18/08

Up Up and No Way

How high I fly
How high
Not
For fear it does beset me.

No rides for me
No tourist traps at
T H E G R A N D C A N Y O N.
Just too
Ahhhh... too too higheeee
for me.

The vocal shrill
comes unwilled
at the terror
of a ladder
or a bladder plea

No rooftop moonlit nights
No treetop Christmas lights
They're just too too high
for me.

Ferris wheel willies
High wire chillies.
No fear, just sheer respect
Whenever circumspect.

Jessica May Moore
5/18/08

I have done this type of exercise before - came to me one day when I was packing some papers. Instead of a newspaper, I was throwing out old calendars (you know the kind with square boxes where you can fit in about 10 words of what to do that day. Anyway, I made poems out of what was said in the boxes. It was really a cool exercise. Then I went further and started making up short stories and using what was listed in the calendar boxes as dialog... now that turned out to be fun and funny!

Very cool idea, Sally!

Ilove this idea, and I'm going to try it. But meanwhile, I'll share a "found poem" I previously wrote that comes from a similar exercise (but using several print sources, not just a newspaper). This one was published last year in the online journal Flutter:

"crackle of stars"

in a falling-down apartment
an incubator of sorts
pressurized air
six lambs and no nest egg
we talk about making the trunk of a tree
and holding onto it feverishly

we are tied up in the notion
that we are the ones denied
in all this hubbub

rapid-fire shots to the torso
the other organs to follow
bullet-ridden fish tank
trash bin set on fire
large chunks of tissue
then another shot

checking scores
we are people in the mix
statistically irrelevant
wildly unsuitable
turning up late everywhere
we don’t have much time for music

how lucky then
after this nervous life
and nights of rain
to take wire cutters
through a chain-link fence
and seed the scaffolding of sky
so gold stars replace the blue
a multitude of crackle
a blast of stars from the ground up

it’s that weightlessness
a dream’s foundation
on which we make our wills

No Great Distinction

Multi-humped colonial colossus of no great distinction,
Sufficient grandeur.
Assuage your distress at not living quite as well.
It’s not just any house,
a temple of transparency,
And now draws worshipful hordes within the glory
Of high modernism.
Nobody in Canaan so far
On one of the most estate-studded thoroughfares,
austere glass-and-concrete confection,
pink stucco and ruthless spatial efficiency.
A more au courant dwelling was blocked
by the neighbors to the rear,
a new paean to maximalism atop
minimalist ruins.
Assuage your distress at not living quite as well.
It’s not just any house
But a multi-humped colossus of no great distinction.

(A "black out" poem, and then sculpted a bit. I think the original article is better. Well, the exercise is certainly fun.)