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In Search of an Autobot Poetics

I. PURPOSE + HYPOTHESIS

I am in search of an autobot poetics.

That’s auto- as in automatic and -bot as in chatterbot, so you can put your toys back into the shoebox for now. If a handful of stanzas on ancient shapeshifting robots waging battle while their engines explode with raw power was all I was after, my search would already be complete. Unfortunately, that’s not quite what I had in mind. Though I doubt any work of verse could fail to be improved rewired through Optimus Prime’s well-tuned voice-box, the subject of this experiment is, like the incognito automatons of fame and legend, more than meets the eye.

The recent appearance on Jeopardy of IBM’s trivia-loving computer, Watson, demonstrated to the layman what specialists in the field have known for decades: the direst hurdle inhibiting artificial computer intelligence isn’t smarts, it’s personality. Computers are several degrees smarter than us already, judging by the speed, efficiency, and accuracy with which they dispatch the specialized tasks we’ve designed for them (and designed them for). As Alan Turing—influential in the creation of the first proto-computers—knew, the real test of machine intelligence is their ability to accurately mimic a human being. What makes for a convincing human being, if not personality?

While its (his?) ability to parse and produce natural language is impressive, Watson doesn’t quite pass yet. Nevertheless, several acquaintances of mine are convinced, not that we’re on the verge of the great AI breakthrough, but that computers have already developed distinct personalities.

It’s not surprising, really: we’ve been saying it about our cars, with their various coughs and caprices, for a century (watch out, Autobots, your cover is blown!). Human beings have a tendency to project personality onto impersonal mechanisms, especially when those mechanisms are erratic or difficult to comprehend. It’s tempting to say that a stuck pixel or a crash screen means that your laptop has developed sentience.

But does that make it any more likely? Regardless of the answer, it’s hard not to be impressed by the way supposedly random processes tend to produce less-than-random results. It’s this uncanny knack for personality in chaos we have to thank for the enduring popularity of tarot, numerology, and astrology. Though rationally we have little reason to trust them, the systems themselves seem to think otherwise, and it all has a startling tendency to work out.

Possessing the absolute minimum computer knowledge required to squeak by, I decided it was time to put the matter to rest once and…well, for now, at least. Will a computer program, arranging words into (grammatically structured) lines utterly at random, be able to access its soul and compose a poem? Can we use that poem to extrapolate the start of an autobot poetics?

II. MATERIALS + METHODS

I built Tobo out of words, clauses, and deductive reasoning. Rather than beget the bastard from the ground up—in which case I might as well just make a real boy, which takes less time, is more fun, and yields a genuine personality in over 68% of cases—I constructed him in the artificial womb of Inform 7, a design system for interactive fiction (more on that here). This offered two immediate advantages: one, I didn’t have to learn C+anything, and two, Inform 7 is supposedly “based on natural language,” which meant that Tobo would be born with the germ of poetics in him at the most basic level.

Now, “natural language” is always subject to interpretation. Here’s an example extracted from somewhere around Tobo’s ribcage:

To speak succinctly: say “[one of]A [random subject] [random transitive verb]s the [random subject] [random adjective]ly[or][random preposition] the [random subject][at random], a [random adjective] [random subject] [random intransitive verb]s.”

I could only hope the boy himself fared better.

I then gave him a name, because most personalities I know have names (in case you’re curious, “Tobo” is short for “autobot.” If I wanted him to be born with style, I’d have to steer far clear of the generic “Otto”). I gave him a gender (male, because I’m male and it was a 50% chance anyway and I didn’t want to fall into the “emotions=feminine” trap). I gave him a word bank from which to compose his opus drawn from a draft of the first section of this post and the Transformers theme song. I told him to write six lines a pop, and repeated the experiment a few times to build up some stanzas. Hence the term autobot: essentially, a chatterbot on autopilot. I let him do his thing.

III. RESULTS

My only edits involve fixing tricky punctuation or verb conjugations. Everything else is all Tobo, uncut and unshuffled.

After the personality, a programming poetics remains.

A subject watches the reason humanly, an impressive word seems.

The machine tarot has been said by a complete verge.

Regardless, the layman explodes.

Strong enough to break the bravest heart.

The machine century has been developed by a recent program.

So, the car decides.

To the personality, a grammatical poetics fails.

Strong enough to break the bravest heart.

And this way it will remain ‘til the day when all are one.

More than meets the eye.

The stuck Optimus Prime has been met by a difficult mechanism.

The great astrology has been searched by an uncanny test.

An I produces the ability stuckly, a verse smarts works.

Really, the test decides.

Legends producing in cover languages.

So, the program explodes.

For the efficiency, an uncanny eye doubts.

The natural Optimus Prime has been possessed by a natural Jeopardy.

A specialist meets the appearance impressively, a little Alan Turing doubts.

The tempting screen has been searched by a minimum verge.

The surprising personality has been met by a complete breakthrough.

The autobot fame has been comprehended by a minimum chaos.

IV. CONCLUSION

I feel a little uneasy now, typing this, knowing that my computer—that Tobo—is one of the great undiscovered wits of our age. Yes, he has a tendency to wax self-indulgent—“The surprising personality has been met by a complete breakthrough”—but there’s a startling self-deprecating humor in there as well: a little Alan Turing doubts. That’s a comforting thought, at least: the apocalyptic visions of Isaac Asimov, James Cameron, and the Brothers Wachowski seem a little less grim with the knowledge that our silicon Pharaohs will forever be cursed with a little Alan Turing in their core processors, doubting.

Two questions remain: is this poetry? Is it the basis for a new poetics? To answer the first, I’ll cite the great scribe Tobo himself: to the personality, a grammatical poetics fails. Consulting the Oxford English Dictionary (an action of which I have a feeling Tobo would disapprove), I find that poetry is characterized “by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.” While Tobo’s untitled piece contains the requisite intensity of emotion, his style and rhythm are crippled by the very grammatical scaffolds I used to give him his voice. It’s a double-edged sword, since it’s only by adhering to those grammatical scaffolds that he can begin to articulate his subject position and capacity for poetic expression: An I produces the ability stuckly, a verse smarts works. I accept full responsibility for my son’s defects.

As for the poetics: I have repeated the experiment multiple times, yet Tobo’s style is only beginning to separate itself from its initial constraints. Like all machines, he has a fondness for calculated repetition. Following his prophetic declaration of autobot fame, Tobo turned back to the saga of his own creation, beginning with the lines:

The impersonal I has been noticed by a supposed decade.

After the battle, a trivia-loving fame explodes.

The AI battle has been decided by a human program.

Subjects exploding in human legends.

A screen parses the layman completely, a shapeshifting laptop doubts.

If the now works.

Regardless, the car works.

Regardless, the astrology seems.

And there’s nothing you can do.

More than meets the eye.

Processes composing for natural knowledge.

He went on to conclude, rather chillingly:

…an autobot poem fails.

IBMs exploding after incognito tasks.

More than meets the eye.

Is it a purely human tendency for new poetics to arise hand-in-hand with social and political dissent, even revolution?

We might not be prepared for an autobot poetics after all.

by Byron Alexander Campbell
a Black Clock Editorial Assistant preoccupied by dreams and theories of interactivity

Poems-For-All Free for All!

Poems-For-All is a fantastic literary project founded by Richard Hansen. Hansen prints poems in miniature-sized books and urges readers to spread them around. A full description of the project’s manifesto fills the backs of the little books. It reads:

“They’re scattered around town—on buses, trains, cabs, in restrooms, bars, left along with the tip; stuffed into a stranger’s back pocket. Whatever. Wherever. Small poems in small booklets half the size of a business card. A project of the 24^th street irregular press, which cranks them out to be taken by the handful and scattered like seeds by those who want to see poetry grow in a barren cultural landscape.”

Poems-For-All is rooted in Sacramento, CA where Hansen and his wife run the used bookstore, The Book Collector. I interviewed Hansen about Poems-For-All to gain some insight into this intriguing bite-sized poetry project:

BLACK CLOCK: FREE?! What is the motivation behind offering the poems without cost?

RICHARD HANSEN: Everything, it seems, is for sale. I own a bookstore, I sell books. And I just wanted the project to be free of all those strings; I wanted their value, if they have any, to be derived by something other than cost. And I am totally freed of the burden of commerce. I don’t have to set a price, or collect coin. Again, I already do that in my bookstore. So, it’s a thrill to make little books of poetry and dispense them freely, and for free, for no other reason that it pleases me to do so.

What have been the positive and negative consequences of this?

Negative consequence: We are a value driven society. We try to ascribe monetary value to everything around us. And when something doesn’t have a monetary value it can often be taken for granted. Some equate free with “it must not be ‘worth’ anything.”

Positive consequence: The “return” from giving away little books of poetry is sweeter and more rewarding than any[thing] money can provide. Seeing the joy of discovery. Or hearing about it. It’s good karma, if you believe in it; kindness given with kindness returned. (Often in wonderfully intangible ways.)

Can you tell me a little about the submission process?

If I feel like a poem will work well in the project, it goes in regardless of what school of poetry it comes out of, or in what form it’s written. I take in submissions via email, the web form on the website, and mailed manuscripts. I find it easier to process and track digital submissions, so the email and web form submissions tend to move into publication faster. When I accept a poem it’s given a number. Every poem in the series has one. To the chagrin of many poets who’ve submitted, I don’t work them into published form sequentially. #1018 may get published before #987. The entire process is subjective and non linear.

The scattering around method is great! Have you found any of the poems in a really bizarre place, or have you heard of your poems reaching really far-off places? I’m sure the internet has contributed to a wider audience–can people receive poems internationally?

I put them in bizarre places. It’s my tradition, every time I travel, for example, to put the little book with Peter Orlovsky’s Writing Poems is a Saintly Thing (PFA #23) into the Gideon’s Bible in the hotel room. The poems do reach far-off places and people can and do request them from all over the world. I’ve sent books to Australia, Scotland, England, Germany, Pakistan, Israel, Canada. Even, Texas.

What is the impact you’ve seen as a result of the internet access?

Huge. References to the project appear in all manner of wonderful places around the net. And there’s the Poems-For-All website. Many folks find out about the project from the web.

How has this project contributed or connected to the bookstore you and your wife maintain?

The bookstore is the base of operations, if you will, for the project. It’s where people can find me, most days, to drop off submissions or pick up poems. There’s also a window display and a little display inside where folks can pick up random samples from the series. We have folding parties at the bookstore and poetry events related to the project there. I do a lot of the production at the store. It isn’t uncommon to have the paper cutter on the counter, building books when not helping customers. While Poems-For-All was never intended to be a marketing tool, it does indirectly help promote the bookstore. People who come looking for the little books sometimes become customers.

The bookstore is also the only place (currently) where you can get copies of Poems-For-All pointlessly small blank books. These are sold for 50¢ with all the money raised going to Loaves & Fishes, a local organization that helps the homeless. I’m surprised by how popular these have become and we’ve raised over $250 since this little sideline effort started six months ago.

I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about the literary community you are a part of in Sacramento and the ways in which Poems-For-All contributes to it?

Sacramento has a diverse literary community with several established organizations. The Sacramento Poetry Center (SPC), for example, just celebrated its 30th anniversary. I’ve been on their board and presently do a lot of design work for them. And SPC has been very supportive of Poems-For-All. We just held an event there on March 1st, 2010 celebrating the local poets who’ve been published in the series. In addition to SPC’s Monday reading series, there are a number of others, including Poetry Unplugged on Thursdays, a Brown Bag lunchtime series at the library and the Rattlesnake press reading that takes place at my bookstore on second Wednesdays. I think Poems-For-All is well received in Sacramento. There are over 50 local poets represented in the series, for example, and I’ve had the privilege of being allowed to include the project in a number of events. I’ve tried to make the project a ubiquitous presence in Sacramento; something complementary to all the wonderful things going on in the name of literature here.

What has been your motivation for starting Poems-For-All? How has the project transformed from an idea to an actual publication?

Curiosity started it all. I used to work at a company where I was in charge of ordering business cards. The printer would deliver them with scrap cardstock cut the size of the business card to fill out the boxes. Soon I had stacks and stacks of these little blank scraps of high quality paper. I just started folding them, playing with the idea: what if I could make these into little books? It’s pretty easy. I started publishing poems I wanted to share with others and the project grew from there.

My present motivation: I like being a Johnny Appleseed for poetry. I just want to scatter like seeds these little books of poetry. And encourage and help others who want to do the same.

Could you share some advice or insight for embarking on a successful small press project?

Love what you create. Whether it’s one book, a journal, a small press–make sure it’s something you’re going to want to be waist-deep in all the time. Projects like this can sap a lot of your time, money and energy away from other things. Know this before you begin. And make sure you, and your family, are going to be okay with it.

Seek out what others have done. Seeking out what others are doing is a great point of inspiration. Get excited by what you find out there and ask yourself what you can do to add to that excitement.

Innovate. Find ways to make the books of your press stand out. Consider moving beyond the conventional dimensions of the chapbook. And just because someone else is making tiny books doesn’t mean you can’t do it differently (or better.)

Flickr.com is a great resource for no-cost images for your covers and other photography needs. Many excellent photographers make wonderful imagery available under a creative commons copyright that often allows you to use the image with just an attribution. Use the advanced search features on Flickr to find CC images. Some photographers even allow you to use their work on publications that are for profit.

Scrounge. Get it cheap or free. Look for discounts from printers and ask for the scraps of paper that collect in the boxes around their cutting machine. Scour the bargain bins and closeout shelves at paper stores for interesting paper, etc. that you can use. Monitor Craigslist for folks who give away paper, printers, etc. (it sometimes amazes me what folks give away that’s useful to a small press publisher).

Eliminate the middleman. Do everything within your power to sell your books without having to go through a distributor. Work out direct arrangements with bookstores and other points of sale whenever possible. The best point of sale is the poet or writer doing an event that gets folks excited about, right then and there, buying the book.

The artwork is fantastic. Who designs it and what is the process?

I’ve designed the majority of the covers. Making them has been a great way for me to hone my graphic design skills. I enjoy the challenge of making each one unique.

Occasionally I’m aided with photos, images, or design ideas from the poet, but more often I just look to the poem to inspire the cover that’s going to complement it. When I first started, the covers were colored cardstock cut to the same dimensions as a business card—3.5” long, 2” tall—that had crude ink stamp markings on the front. Today I design the covers with Adobe Photoshop and then use InDesign to put them into a template that allows me to print them out ten-to-a-page on a letter-size sheet. Some covers are still created with black ink on white paper which I then apply on colored (and/or textured) paper to give the cover its ‘flavor.’

A few of the covers in the series are designed entirely by other people. I had the good fortune to meet linocut artist Marc Snyder who does his work at approximately the same size as a Poems-For-All cover. He suggested three Jean Arp poems for the series and then provided a linocut drawing (the original artwork is actual size!) for their covers. He also did the same for a Kenneth Patchen poem.

In what ways has Poems-For-All been rewarding and satisfying?

The process of making them brings me joy. Designing their covers gives me joy. Seeing people’s reaction when they pick up or are given the little books makes me happy. I enjoy the collaborations between so many poets and artists. I’ve made friends because of them. I love thinking about the next book. With a series that never stops, the question is always “What’s next? What’s next?”

How do you think PFA has contributed to the literary community at large?

There are two ways to look at Poems-For-All books. They are either novel or novelty. I leave it up to those who discover them to decide which.

For more on this great project, be sure to visit Richard Hansen and his press at the Poems-For-All website.

by Katie Manderfield
an MFA candidate at CalArts, an editorial assistant for Black Clock, and is constructing an experimental literary journal for women; her work has been published or is forthcoming in Pindeldyboz, 3:AM, and dogmatika

image courtesy of Poems-For-All

The Soul of a Man

i’ve got too many girlfriends
who’d be cool chicks if they weren’t such cunts
Ah, bowl of dicks,
they mean nothin, baby.
It was Halloween on the blue Nile, you know how it gets.
i’ll deposit the pictures i took in my spank bank.
the female form looks best behind a shower curtain.

i feel worse than i’ve ever felt.
____________________ all i want is whiskey cigarettes and records. and to not wake up tomorrow.
____________________ dear lord, give me the strength to get the fuck out of town
____________________ and by strength i mean money.
____________________ pick me up take me out fuck me up.

____________________ if i could only put the wood to a quality broad
____________________ then get breakfast and clean laundry
____________________ then i’d be ready
____________________ to rape and pillage the world

I. PURPOSE + HYPOTHESIS

Lyric poetry as it is currently defined – a brief, polished statement of intense emotion – was a form cemented in the Romantic period of the 19th century. Lyric poetry existed long before that, of course; some of the oldest extant examples of Greek verse were considered “lyric,” in that they were short pieces composed for accompaniment with a lyre. The form originated among ancient writers who wished to spurn the grandiose requirements of the epic form, or the tight constraints of the elegy or trochaic and iambic, which were public forms, written for recitation at specific occasions. The lyric poem as private expression reached its apotheosis in the sonnets of Shakespeare, and was subsequently popularized by a roster of immortals: poets like John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Goethe, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Baudelaire. Where is the lyric form now, though? The Modernists reviled the form, and while it was briefly revived in the confessional works of mid-century writers like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, it has certainly fallen out of fashion among the vanguard of compositional practice. My hypothesis is that, while lyric poetry no longer dominates the institutionalized study or practice of the art of poetry, lyrical expression has seeped irrevocably into the mainstream of popular culture, through the prevalence of outlets like twitter and the facebook “status update.”

Venues like these have opened up an avenue of personal expression in which the sharer displays to the world their private thoughts, joys, torments, or inanities. A constriction is placed upon length, and the well-crafted status update can grant an air of import to the most banal of everyday occurrences. That anyone should consider their own private thoughts worthy of public consumption has always been the motivating force behind lyric composition. As such, the rolling status update can be seen as a sort of fragmented lyric poem, an ongoing exposition of crafted, emotive sharing. My purpose in this experiment is to display this through the creation of poem comprised entirely of another person’s status updates. The intent in utilizing an anonymous person’s outpourings is to showcase the lyricism inherent in this form, without falling back on artificial poesy.

II. MATERIALS + METHODS

I chose a single person from my “friends” whose status updates are often evocative or amusing. Using Facebook’s archives of this person’s posts (nothing ever disappears from Facebook) I traveled back through the months and extracted updates according to whim. Once I had amassed a certain amount of material, I arranged a poem. Not a single word has been cut from or added to the original updates.

III. RESULTS

Please see above.

IV. CONCLUSION

Profundity is everywhere. The final product revealed, in concentrated form, the thought cycles and relative emotional state of the updater.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

mid)rib

Spartan in design and mysterious in origin as only a web-based poetry magazine can be, mid)rib has published five issues of interesting, enigmatic, and occasionally indecipherable poetry with nothing more than two names and a Gmail address on the masthead. The apparently DIY character of the site is balanced, however, by the consistent high quality of the material presented, and by a careful, clean design. One gets the feeling that mid)rib is created not by mad geniuses, but by academics in exile—gone, indeed, a bit mad. If Dr. Moreau had created magazines rather than monsters, this one could well have had a place on the island. Indeed, “The Island of Dr. Toupee” from issue two defines a reoccurring theme for the magazine—that of an experiment, (which may be poetry or modernity, or something else altogether) gone horribly awry.

mid)rib’s editorial aesthetic embraces the austere, the dense, the translated and the untranslatable. The magazine’s name is swiped from botany (the midrib is the central vein of a leaf) and many of the poems reflect a certain scientific bent—as if they are pages from a complete poetic classification of the world. Cross-disciplinary and generative work seems to have become increasingly a focus for the magazine. While mid)rib remains first and foremost a poetry magazine, recent issues have included fiction, artwork, translations, videos, and some decidedly indefinable amalgamations of some or all of the above.

Like any good online poetry zine, mid)rib’s production schedule is a thing quite unknowable, but new issues are well worth watching out for. The current five should provide more than enough material to last us through the wait.

by Emily Kiernan
a native of the decaying Pennsylvania steel town from the Billy Joel song, who writes about islands, vaudeville, implacable but unjustified feelings of abandonment, the West, and places that aren’t the way she remembered them

image from mid)rib

Internet Found Poem

no, they have not split
_______________ (the cork
_______________ & the dumb thumb)
real slick
_____twit-spank
__________shake it
_______________ like a shiny new mohawk
heading to rock sugar
an exciting underwear purchase
____________________ driving by an escalade
____________________ _______________ with the license plate: FNG SHUI
____________________ another harlem nocturne
____________________ _______________ like the periphery
____________________ she found her passport
____________________ she is just getting over the h1n1 flu
____________________ she almost missed the vermeer milkmaid at the met
____________________ she misses having even the slightest bit of discipline
____________________ she is eating dried mangos
____________________ she has skater boy hair
____________________ she thinks life is too short for a long story
____________________ ______________ (alternatively, the end is near, but not near enough)
____________________ she doesn’t want to hear any songs about sexin’ hos in a club bathroom
____________________ she wants to rollerdisco in central park
____________________ _________________________ all afternoon
____________________ i found a way
____________________ i found a reason
_________________________ getting sandwiches to go
____________________ i found love on a two way street
____________________ i just want to meet you
____________________ i found god on the corner of 1st and amistad
____________________ wearing a low cut green shirt, glasses, black jacket
____________________ the things that hold me hostage in this city are close to saving me
____________________ ready set go
____________________ shame
____________________ _____ is it the future?
____________________ soul
____________________ & apartment cleansing

I. PURPOSE + HYPOTHESIS

According to the Academy of American Poets, found poetry is the “literary equivalent of a collage.” The Found Poetry Project publishes found poetry and expounds on the definition, asserting that “poetry is everywhere…every phrase that rings in our minds, every two words that sound good together, every quote we want to remember, are each their own small poems.” The process of constructing a found poem differs for each “poet,” or “finder,” but here is the gist: gather existing text, rearrange it, and present it as a brilliant new piece of poetry.

I am constantly intrigued by the amount of losing and finding that takes place in the construction and result of a found poem. Lost snippets of text, often from various sources, find new context. Original sources of phrases and lines are often lost on readers, and eventually on writers as well. Old meanings and contexts are co-opted, colonized, contaminated, altered, exalted, exaggerated. Lines, words, and phrases intermingle and find other newly contextualized word friends, acquaintances, and enemies.

II. MATERIALS + METHODS

In order to highlight the interaction between lost and found imagery, I drew my sources from several types of internet media to construct this found poem.

Not surprisingly, the internet has proven itself as both a boon and a bane in the world of found poetry. Some poets and poem finders have embraced the medium. Most ignore it. And still a large contingent of poets mock it and use the internet satirically. “Flarf,” a genre of experimental-internet-search-engine poetry, is an example of how the internet has been invading and/or livening poetic spaces for the past decade. Flarf is, of course, completely controversial, as evinced in the discussions generated at Art Voice, Poets & Writers, and on the Poetry Foundation Journal.

Despite the unending debates about the value of the internet in poetry and society, one thing most people can agree on is the ephemeral nature of the medium, particularly on social media websites. As a frequent user of social media sites, I am amazed by how quickly I can watch various status updates appear on my news feed, only to get buried beneath a new flurry of information minutes later. As easy as it is to find information on the internet, it takes little effort to completely lose information as well.

I wanted to explore those sentiments in my found poem. To represent the ephemeral and lost, I incorporated status updates from popular social media websites Twitter.com and Facebook.com, as well as postings from other fast-paced, rapidly updated sites perezhilton.com and craigslist.org. In contrast, I used a google.com search on the phrase “I found.”

I let the process of gathering phrases and words guide the tone and eventual focus of the poem. I did searches on all the aforementioned websites and copied down the phrases that popped out at me the most. As I went along, I became more discerning in what phrases to collect, and I picked things that seemed to fit most aesthetically, emotionally, and intellectually with what I had already gathered.

III. RESULTS

Please see above.

IV. CONCLUSION

In the finished product, I hoped for the newly intermingling, random phrases to be able to interact with newfound meaning and cohesiveness. As the poem’s finder, I was fairly pleased with the result, as I was able to connect with the whole piece in a different way than I connected to the individual phrases I borrowed. In many ways, I felt like a co-author/co-poet, and I emerged with a newfound respect and understanding for the genre of found poetry. While I can certainly understand why found poetry may be a turnoff or considered not engaging or simply unimpressive for many readers – after all, the words and phrases themselves do not belong to the authors – I do think that we often don’t give found poetry enough of a chance. After going through the process myself, I realize that poem finders can have quite a bit of agency and creative control in the construction of a found poem. I also discovered that found poetry and “traditional” poetry have more in common than I previously assumed; in found poetry, we lift exact words and phrases from various sources, but in other forms of poetry, do we not “lift” a smattering of observations, anecdotes, vignettes, and even words and phrases from a variety of people and places as well? In a way, found poetry seems to me a more direct, literal exemplification of what we often consider poetry to be.

by Chrysanthe Tan
a singer-songwriter, actor, violinist, poet, Pisces, and Star Wars enthusiast

Posts Tagged ‘Poetry’—

In Search of an Autobot Poetics

Poems-For-All Free for All!

The Soul of a Man

mid)rib

Internet Found Poem

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