During National Poetry Month (April), I took part in a Found Poetry Project put on by the literary magazine, The Found Poetry Review. A total of 84 poets each took on a work of fiction which won the Pulitzer Prize, and each day of the month produced one new found poem - one for each day in April - to post on the project's website. When the project was completed, there were 2,500 new works of found poetry completed.
Found poetry is the art of excerpting words and phrases from any written source and combining them in new ways to form a poem. The work I applied for and was granted was Tinkers by Paul Harding which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010.
To learn more about this National Poetry Month initiative, check out their website: http://www.pulitzerremix.com/. It was a great exercise to be "forced" to write a poem a day. It's always a good thing to change the pace, style, pressure, and inspiration of one's writing for a spell. Shakes things up.
Several of my found poems from this project are due to be be published in Unpredictable Change Quarterly in October 2013. The editor of The Found Poetry Review is also submitting a collection of the best poems from this project to publishers. This Fall, I will also take part in readings (hopefully more than one) in greater Seattle with Remix poets who live in northwest Washington.
