Found Poetry

Clay from over at NaBloPoMonth writes:

"I've started an Open University Poetry course recently. One of the forms we examine is the concept of the 'found' poem which is basically taking a piece of writing be it a magazine or newspaper article or advert and then scanning through the text and writing down single random words (i.e no phrases or whole sentences) that attract your attention and then use the words to write a poem."

It sounds fun, so thought I would try my hand. As a school project right now, I am evaluating the National Library of Congress archival project, "Westward by Sea: a Maritime perspective on westward expansion." These archives cover the years 1820-1890, and include ship diaries, correspondence, drawings, and other documents from ship captains, explorers, and passengers. The archive is amazing (and so, by the way, is the entire selection of archives in the American Memory project- there are thousands of movies, audio clips, photographs, journals, letters, posters and advertising, all collected in easy to navigate collections spanning topics such as Slavery, Work & Leisure, the San Francisco Earthquake, Native Americans, Louisisana Purchase, Skyscrapers, etc. Check out the archives at www.memory.loc.gov and the Maritime collection at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award99/mymhihtml/mymhihome.html)

Without further ado, here is my first attempt at a found poem, which I found in the diaries of Captain James Minor, on a journey from New Haven Connecticut to San Francisco California (which he notes as being part of Mexico), in 1849. Read the whole journal here: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mymhiwe:@field(DOCID+@lit(mymhiwemv668)):@@@$REF$ The title of the poem is a phrase from his journal.

Time passes heavily

uneasy violence squalls into
howling disjointed confusion
you mourn,
suffer silently
but I endeavor to revive the dead.