Anywhere we choose to look

Poetry is hiding. In train announcements, tabloid pages and grocery labels.

I have a new joy: The Found Poetry Project, a blog dedicated to celebrating the unintended beauty of ordinary prose.

“Anyone can write poetry and poetry is everywhere,” explains Timothy Green, who, with Megan O’Reilly Green, created the The Found Poetry Project blog in 2005. “Poetry is nothing more than finding enjoyment in the medium that we spend most of our waking hours living within. It happens by accident all the time.”

For example, with a few line breaks, a travel guide offers unexpected beauty:

From La Ventosa

roads lead
east and west.

Each soon splits

with a leg
heading inland

and a leg
following the coast.

One branch
following the coast

the other

climbing

to Oaxaca.

— Written by Mike Church and Terri Church
Traveler’s Guide to Mexican Camping, p. 318
Rolling Homes Press, 2005

— Found by Sandra Leigh
Nanaimo, B.C., Canada

Rather than willing words into place, the Project seeks unintentional poetry, whether it’s in a newspaper article, a blog, a letter to a friend, bathroom graffiti — anywhere you don’t expect to find it. The rules are simple: no editing other than lineation, punctuation, or omission. Titles are optional.

“Poetry,” notes Green, “appears anywhere we choose to look.”

Shuffle the inventory

Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects . . .
and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered
in every way conceivable.

— Italo Calvino

As quoted in Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life
by Rebecca Lawton and Jordan Rosenfeld

Scrap metal

I'm a hit and run, and I'm happy about it.

Paul Toth, editor of the quirky online Hit and Run Magazine, collects the scrap metal of emerging art. He publishes index cards, napkin notes, and other scree and scrawl of art not fully formed.

He posted mine today --- and he wants yours, too.

Of heart and hurt

When writer Holly Hughes started talking about her mother’s Alzheimer’s — what she calls “a slow process of subtraction” — she quickly realized she was not alone. At readings of her poems, a crowd would gather afterward “to tell the story of their mother, father, husband, sister, wife, sister, brother.”

Alzheimer’s is estimated to affect one in two persons over the age of 80 and is being diagnosed in people as young as 50.

Seeking comfort in the solace of words, Hughes put out a call for poems and short prose about Alzheimer’s. Over 500 people responded — doctors, nurses, social workers, hospice workers, daughters, sons, wives, and husbands whose lives have been touched by the disease. From this, she chose work from 100 writers to create Beyond Forgetting: Poetry & Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, a moving account of a dreadful disease.

Oregon-based writers Kake Huck, Drew Myron and Mark Thalman will share their work as part of Off the Page, a reading event on Saturday, April 25 at 7pm at the Green Salmon Coffeehouse in Yachats, Oregon. The event is free.

“In our culture, we often talk about dementia only in the abstract, as a label, not in all its bittersweet concreteness,” notes Hughes, who teaches at Edmonds Community College in Lynnwood, Washington.

Through the transformative power of poetry, the book seeks to move "beyond forgetting," beyond the stereotypical portrayal of Alzheimer's disease to honor and affirm the dignity of those afflicted. With a moving foreword by poet Tess Gallagher, the anthology forms a richly textured, literary portrait encompassing the full range of the experience of caring for someone with Alzheimer’s.

“For the many people now trying to cope with a loved one suffering from this tragic disease,” says Hughes “I hope this collection will provide solace."

Beyond Forgetting is published by Kent State University Press, and is available at www.beyondforgettingbook.com.

Love this line

There is no
single word for the charity of your smile.

— from Cadaver Dog by Seth Abramson

Hear the full poem at Linebreak.