Friday poetry challenge: found poetry

Two events this week have made me think about the future of written communication. First, the college e-mail server was out of commission for nearly 36 hours, leading to widespread panic among people incapable of imagining other methods of communicating; and second, I read A Wild Perfection: Selected Letters of James Wright, which offers a reminder of the depth and breadth of information that ordinary people once regularly conveyed by means of letters. I love the way the poet's voice comes through in even the most mundane passages, transforming ordinary events into luminous lyrical moments.

Collections of letters provide a quirky but compelling glimpse into the lives of long-dead authors, but what will happen in the future when the written letter disappears and scholars are left with scattered e-mail messages, Twitter feeds, and Facebook status lines--some corrupted, some deleted, some lost in internet limbo? Ye shall know me by my bytes.

Which is not to say that electronic communication is worthless. Indeed, tweets and e-mails may acquire a poetic compression of expression, as in this brief excerpt from an e-mail message:

Cold enough here
for a cold-weather coat,
which is what I didn't take
when I walked the dog past hail
in those small vales and gullies
in the park beside the library.

Or this brief but colorful Facebook status line:

Sun streaming
through yellow leaves
and the scent
of autumn.

--Both borrowed from private or public messages and simply formatted to look like poetry.

Today's challenge: manipulate a passage from an electronic message to make visible the poetry hiding within the bytes.

Friday poetry challenge: love songs to food

In "Keep Your Hands Off Our Haggis," an article in today's New York Times, Alexander McCall Smith debunks recent claims that haggis originated in England rather than in Scotland (read it here), boldly asserting that "If one's national bard writes a poem to a dish consisting of chopped-up offal cooked in a sheep's stomach together with oatmeal and spices and secured with a curious pin, then the dish must be authentically national."

He refers, of course, to the Robert Burns poem "Address to a Haggis," which begins thus:

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the pudding-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.

Lurking somewhere behind all that auld lang syne is the sort of passion for food that one does not often see in classical poetry. Sure, William Carlos Williams put those wonderful plums into free verse, but imagine if old man Frost had been inspired by a passion for mashed potatoes:

Whose spuds these are I think I know;
His house is in the village, though.
He will not see me stopping here
To steal his lovely potato.

Or how about Joyce Kilmer:

I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as kim-chee....

Or Emily Dickinson:

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
I clapped a net over his head
And ate the fellow, raw.

Clearly, some of our great poets have missed their calling--but that doesn't mean you have to. Today's challenge: write a paean in verse to a particular food item. You may alter an existing poem or produce something entirely new. I'll start:

The staff of life would fall down flat
Without a boost from yeast.
But let those microbes do their work
And bread becomes a feast.

Rats, now I'm hungry.

Found poetry

Lines Encountered a Few Paragraphs into a Student Paper, Where They Work Better as Poetry than as Argument

The poet is a way
for the world to keep moving
and for the people
oppressed
on its surface
to stay faithful.