Found Poem: Lost in woods on subzero night (#SOL15, Day 8)

2.18.15 newspaper from Portland, Maine

A few weeks ago I was in Maine and as I was sipping some coffee in a local place, the headline from a newspaper someone had left behind caught my eye: "Lost in woods on subzero night, two teens
survive on smarts."

I quickly read the story about the two teenagers, Tyler and Jonah. At the time I was uncertain as to why I was snapping pictures of the story--but it felt like a potential poem--a found poem. I wrote the poem from Jonah's point of view.

Lost in Woods On Subzero Night

9 p.m.
below zero
lost in the Maine woods
after the Arctic Cat quit.

Stay calm
keep moving.


Me & Tyler walked through knee-deep snow,

Scared.

Lost in Woods (Reilly, 2015)

    I'd have gone a little crazy
             out there
             in the middle of the woods
             without him:
                 (I trust this kid
                 with my life
                             my life).


            Show me a sign.

            Come on.

            Show me a sign.



Find shelter
build a fire.




Tyler says:

A shooting star
goes down
and that's where the storage shed is.
We tore boards off, 

broke the lock 

to get inside--used a fire starter:

                             Gasoline & a broken sign.


We spent the night

           huddled

and
                                          waited

               waited

                          waited.



At dawn
we walked out.

We walked
                     across the ice
found that road
that led us here
now

                           alive.

Poetry Break - From Ulysses: The Altered Page

In the author's note to Mornings Like This: Found Poems, Annie Dillard (1995) writes:

“Usually happy poets who write found poetry go pawing through popular culture like sculptors on trash heaps. They hold and wave aloft usable artifacts and fragments: jingles and ad copy, menus and broadcasts — all objet trouvés, the literary equivalents of Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and Duchamp’s bicycle. By entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles. The poet adds, or at any rate increases, the element of delight. This is an urban, youthful, ironic, cruising kind of poetry. It serves up whole texts, or interrupted fragments of texts.” (Mornings Like This)

In Dillard's book, the poets use the bits and pieces of language they found inside new poems. This is a slightly different twist on found poems.  Many years ago, I participated along with 49 other teachers in a series of poetry engagements that after was fashioned into the Stephen Dunn and William Stafford's book, Getting the Knack.  They invited us, mostly English teachers (if I am remembering correctly) to try our hand at the different types of poems. The found poem was among the list. Since then I have use found poems as ways into and out of literature (Things They Carried), as altered art,  and as artful close reading.  Below is another g of it, finding a poem on a age of text in this case a page from James Joyce's Ulysses.

Love

Noon slumbers.
                 I know the voice.
The blue fuse burns          loose.

Spurned lover.
Lover, for her love he prowled.

Loveless, landless, wifeless.

Noon Slumbers (M.A. Reilly, 2014 - p. 43 from Ulysses)