Good, Better, Best
"Celia" Remix

Found poem finds home

Happy Poetry Friday! A quick bit of news today. A local journal here in Connecticut published one of my found poems, "Out of all the ways you could have went about this scenario"; it's in issue #9 (Sept. 15, 2021) of Scribes*MICRO*Fiction.

The poem begins,

Is this the train to New Haven?

You never know

What’s your course?

Someone just texted that they saw me in Miami

Read the rest here. You'll need to scroll down on the page to find it just above a photo of the subway.

Denise Krebs has the Sept. 17th Poetry Friday roundup at her blog, Dare to Care.

Comments

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What a fabulous find. I love your gleaned lines. And congratulations on your publication!

So cool, Susan! I love the line, "Sometimes you gotta apologize".
I eavesdrop on the trains here in Switzerland all the time. The only conversations I understand are between toddlers and their mums...because well, I am a toddler in my German language development. :) Congratulations!

Susan, congratulations! Well done. "Please, Papa" is a nice ending. Like the street art, your poem is a snapshot of New York at that very moment. It was a good idea, and I got to read it earlier when you shared it, and now today as a published piece. Great!

Kathryn, Bridget, and Denise, thank you so much for reading! I have so enjoyed my return to participating in Poetry Friday, which helped me get back to writing regularly. I appreciate the good wishes very much. If any of you have poems around 100 words, you might think of submitting them to Scribes*MICRO*Fiction. I revised & expanded this one here so that it would fit. Nice people there!

Very nice, Susan. The comments you chose for your poem really resonated. I love that they are just disconnected snippets. It made me feel I was clacking along in a subway, which I miss very much doing.

Thanks so much, Janice. A friend used the term "word photography," and I think it fits!

Oooh, love it, Susan! I love the way these two lines work together:

You should not have said, “Here’s the thing”
That’s not art

Congrats on the publication!

Karen, thanks so much! I really like finding juxtapositions like that! When you harvest sentences on the street, you're so not in control of the material in a way that virtually everything is a surprise. It's one of my favorite things about the method!

That's so cool! Congrats. You really captured the feeling of what it feels like to sit on the train hearing but not really paying attention to the conversations. It's just bits and pieces.

Thanks so much, Linda! I once tried writing a poem of everything I heard and saw aboard the train from CT to NYC. It's very long! And the task was, of course, impossible.

Fun found poem Susan, I like the surprise that each line and stanza offers us, your lines in the beginning,
"You never know
What’s your course?"
plays out throughout the poem. Congrats on the publication!

How wonderful that your found poem, found a wider audience. Congratulations!

Michelle and Elisabeth, thanks so much for stopping by and for your nice words here. Constructing the poems after gathering the lines is a big challenge, and I'm glad to hear what you say!

Congrats, Susan--you did a nice job order those snippets to create a *kind* of narrative without losing any of the random mystery.

Heidi, thanks! I am working on a collection of these poems.

I love this! Especially the title!

Thank you! I have to admit that the title made me laugh when I heard it. Often I can't tell whether an argument is taking place or whether the speaker is just relaying the story of a they said/I said argument to a third party. I didn't know what the case was here, but the speaker, who was sitting on some steps and talking, did sound exasperated...and funny. I don't remember who said what in every case, but I do in this one.

Many a time, I listened to conversations on the trains in NYC but here you captured the times so nicely. Congratulations on your publication of this poem. Susan.

Thanks so much, Carol! Some of them you just can't help paying attention to, right?

Congratulations!

Thank you, Mary Lee!

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