No. 7 Found Poem: Brooklynhenge

brooklynhenge

Then, just like that,
the light
was gone.

The doorbell
rang again:
too late.

-- Zann Carter 04.07.09 Found poem from The New Yorker 03.30.09 p 24 Talk of the Town

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Notes: Found poems are fun, but I always hesitate to include them when I do readings, or even think of them as "my" poems, even when I have drastically reworked the words, phrases and sentences taken from another text. I am going to rethink this reluctance.

The above is what poets.org calls a "pure" found poem. It is two lines taken directly from the cited article, in the order they were.

In 1986, I created the following poem, from rearranged bits and pieces from, again, a New Yorker article (the New Yorker just seems to have the best words and phrases!)

Summer Party

All the world's windows
are black jewels
flecked with gold
light,

midnight silhouettes
transformed in a glittering
obsession
with mirrors.

Everyone's sunk
in the padded elegance
of conversation,
lost in the echoing,

decadence of marble,
forgetting deliberately
the thin purple
walls

of cells, their eccentric
red symphonies,
how life
is a dance

always on glass.
At dawn
pale celebrants
blink,

bewildered and so
surprised, stranded
in oblivious
pink light,

the consuming loss
of the season
a far laugh
in the playful dunes.

--Zann Carter (1986) Found poem from New Yorker article