A Found Poem from the pages of Remain pages 126-7

Last night, I finished one of my most anticipated reads of 2025: Remain by Nicholas Sparks and M. Night Shyamalan. The collaboration of these two intrigued me before the story ever did. A romance writer and a supernatural suspense scriptwriter seemed like one of those high-end restaurant menu pairings where you get two unexpected items that blend in the most spectacular way. like how the first person to ever put cinnamon on sweet potatoes discovered. My head is still spinning, and I still have to sort out a few things about it – as I anticipated for the Shyamalan part – but once I get the ice on the sidewalk figured out, I will know whether it gets four stars or five.

For today, I am using two pages to create a Found poem from the words and phrases across an open book. I laid the book down and, like those little lights in the peripheral vision that Tate experienced in the story that led him, I looked for which words I felt would be illuminated on the pages and jotted them down. And I wonder with pages like these how many poems books hold and can spin, just waiting to be found.

Ordinary Pleasures

ordinary pleasures

tell a story

coffee shop chat

meet my eyes

laugh

a battered old piano

roll up your sleeves

beautiful spirit

shine through

tender moments reserved

making dinner together

taking dogs to the park

fill my cup

envision it

know your heart

find love

change your life forever

October 26 – Found Poetry

I worked with two Humanities teachers in my school district to design a writing workshop for students in our 9th Grade Academy with ways that they can create poetry from prose. Here is one form of writing we used in two variations: found poetry and blackout poetry. I was using my blog post from Tuesday to model how to let prose inspire poetry.

Found Poetry

Found poetry is poetry that is found in the words of existing poems or prose and created as a new original work.  Some poets use pages of discarded books or those from Little Free Libraries as a supply of pages. Blackout poetry is a form of found poetry.  In found poetry, you use any existing writing and swipe those words to go in your own poem.  In blackout poetry, you draw black lines through the words you did not select for your poem.  

A Silly Selfie

I thought it

   was a

          silly 

                selfie

                            this gift ~ 

                                                     one of the grandchildren 

            posing

                          playing

                                            the look on his face

                                                                      priceless

Here is what my blackout poem looked like in print form:

Day 28 of #VerseLove with Glenda Funk: Strike Through Poetry

Glenda Funk of Idaho is our host for Day 28 of #VerseLove, inspiring us to write Strike Through Poems. You can read her full prompt here. Strikethrough poetry is similar to found or blackout poetry, where a poem exists within an existing poem.

Photo by Sergij on Pexels.com

The Key

Don’t you wish we

could take the key

to the end of

the island like

we used to do

when I was little

and you could still

say Latin names

for each shell and bird and tree

your love for them pure

and passionate before

the day it all changed

for you?

Crossings

Erica Johnson, our host at http://www.ethicalela.com for the first day of our five-day October Open Write, wrote one of my favorite forms of poetry – found poetry – in an art museum using the artists’ statements about the works! You can read her poem here – it surely captures the essence of departure by someone, leaving us to feel the loneliness that comes, almost missing them before they get fully out of sight. I feel I have been on an art exhibit tour today. Erica invited us to find poems in artists’ statements about paintings as well. I have a framed print of a painting that my parents gave me for Christmas in 1984, after I fell in love with the landscapes of the English countryside painted by John Constable following a visit to the National Gallery in London. My favorite Constable work: The White Horse, kept at the Frick Collection in New York. Here is the art link: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.1146.html

The White Horse

six-foot wide space
a new technique
spanning canvas
no longer overshadowed

The White Horse
crosses
the River Stour
to the other side
on a barge

full-size sketch
with broad brushstrokes
thus crossing a new
career threshold

The White Horse painting appears at 2:37 and at 2:49 in the video