Experienced bloggers advise newbies, “Post early and often.” Doggone it, I just can’t seem to do that. Notwithstanding the fact that I don’t think clearly before 10 a.m., I also couldn’t post one of my long poetry responses every single day. I’d burn out in a month and so would my readers.
But I do want blog more frequently. My solution is to create short posts of what I call “poetry found,” for lack of a better term. “Found poetry” (more here) refers to piecing together words and phrases from texts already in existence to create another text, a poem. “Poetry found” will refer to moments, textual and non, that carry an import beyond their context.
Let me translate that gobbleygook into English. Everyday we have experiences that need to be pulled apart from the others and examined or appreciated. These moments—-overheard conversations, odd juxtapositions, and snippets of books—-can be poem-like if not quite poetry. Think of poetry found as pulling a photograph from a jumbly pile of hundreds of photographs and placing it on black matting.
So I begin right now.
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Today in a checkout line, the woman behind me said to the person on the other end of her cellphone, “You’re the first person I’ve been able to tell my stories to.”
Her past loneliness made me sad. At the same time I admired her honesty.
There was a pause on her end of the conversation before she replied, “I’m respectful of other people’s time, that’s all.”
My thought: How many people in this world are waiting for someone else to have time to listen to them?