It’s been a while since I last shared a little bit of obscure poetry with you. I must sound like a broken record by now but I really have been very busy. I am in the process trying out a new method but I’m finding it difficult to fall in love with the results I’ve been getting so you might have to wait a little while for that one (cryptic, aren’t I?).

Anyway, I recently received an email from a family friend introducing me to a new method of constructing poetry from existing poems. Some of the results are really great, and it will give you an excuse to get some of the poetry books that might be craving some attention down from your shelves.

The method is as follows:

Take poetry books (individual poets and anthologies) to use as your base. You can select as few or as many as your collection allows (the method will also work with a single book, just remove step one).

Step one. Go to www.random.org and get a random number for your range of books.

Step two. Pick out the random book and find the pages for the actual poetry, for example 13–232, enter this range in the random number generator. Take the resulting number and go to that page in the book.

Step three. Get the range of lines on the page (eg 1–24) and enter this range in the random number generator. Go to the random line, et voilà, you have a line for your random poem.

Step four. Repeat until you have the number of lines you want for your poem (however many you like!).

Step five. Use the random number generator to rearrange the lines randomly.

Step six. (optional) Choose an extra line to use as the title for your poem.

Here are some of the examples Ross sent to me:

Slipped in the wet grass
(Merioneth’s bright as billow)
See glorious ages opening to our view
So sang the grains of sand, and while they whirled
to a pattern
So snugly in the depths
Occult. By son of Man, ambiguous name,
By Ignorance and parching Poverty,
To plume a lady’s gear; the motet waits
The lady Geraldine espies
Like the leaves scattered! Pale generating
creatures of clay
And Judas was a terrible chap!
Verde que te quiero verde
And make those flights on the bankes of Thames

This poem has a few German lines and one in French, the translations of which are displayed in parentheses. This example also, as per step six, uses a 14^th line as a title:

Those cruel wings
And many a skeleton shook his head
Have passed by cedar, pine and yew
Sanfter träumet und schläft in Armen der Erde der Titan (In the arms of the earth the titan lies dreaming)
Das Leben und lassen wollten sie nicht (The life and they didn’t wish to part from it)
Reif sind, in Feuer getaucht, gekochet (Ripe they are, dipped in fire, cooked)
In a cave’s heart, until a thunderstorm
Without even the encumbrance of a brother
With free long looking ere I die
Ja, schon sagt mir gerüht dein Blick, mir sagt es die Träne, (Yes, I can tell by your emotion, your eyes, your tears)
Trouve, ô Chasseur, nous le voulons (Find, O Hunter, we desire it)
Here on this very campus years ago
There’s no more to tell
I don’t know when it’s likely to get better

The results, I think, speak for themselves. Credit for the previous two poems and the method itself is to poet and author Ross Tomkins, whose book entitled Short Works is now available on Amazon.

Now for my attempt:

For the Garden
To rise from Generation free:
He who was living is now dead
with a bare bodkin?
His present blessings, and to hushed up
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
Cascading through the dusty road
a cage for small bikes; rows of potted plants
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
I did not fall when I fell down the stairs
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
His energies roll back upon his heart,
And by came an angel who had a bright key,
And underneath the spreading tree

I think this method has been my favourite so far. While it might seem a bit complicated at first it really isn’t and you soon get the hang of it. I really enjoyed trying it out and the results so far have been great (I am particularly pleased that I ended up with a couple of rhyming lines in mine). The great thing about found poetry is you can attribute any meaning to the finished product, I get a very different feel from each of the poems listed here, at the very least some sense seems to emerge from the randomness.