Thursday, April 10, 2014

What Will the Future Bring?



Photo Credit: an untrained eye via Compfight cc

Clouded,
the ability to stand back
and
not control it.
Because we live in a revolutionary time,
they provide a cornucopia of tools,
massive paradigm shifts,
unknown excitement, pleasures, and dangers,
a world of constant and unrelenting
abundance
that
must be filtered through the past and present
in a primitive wilderness.
Take a trail map
and
harness
those who lag behind.

Photo Credit: h.koppdelaney via Compfight cc

It is Day 10 in NaPoWriMo. Today I have used the April PAD prompt, which is to write the future poem. I wrote a found poem. I used this text on the future of education (which I warmly recommend, by the way) and copy-pasted random words and phrases. The punctuation and the capitalisation is mine.

4 comments:

  1. Very interesting and effective take on a found poem. That copy-paste fragmentation is somewhat evident in the poem, but not in a way that distracts from the poem at all. I also really love that last sentence:

    'Take a trail map
    and
    harness
    those who lag behind.'

    That has such a committed punch to it. I love it.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you, Rodney. I know there are a few places in the poem where copy-pasting is evident - those one-word lines I put in because I was desperately trying to keep the poem grammatically correct without adding words and phrases of my own. I'll work on those. What's great about publishing poetry in a blog is that you can go back and edit as many times as you wish for as long as you wish. Glad you like the last sentence.

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  2. I really like this, Nadia. I'm doing only found poetry this month with the Oulipost group and it's often a huge challenge to write something that feels poetic from a source text. I had no idea until I read your comments that this was the result of a found poetry challenge,

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    Replies
    1. Thank you Barbara. I admire you for doing the Oulipost challenge - it is so difficult. I follow a couple of bloggers who are doing it and the prompts are really hard. As I have said in my answer to Rodney's comment, it is difficult to keep your poem grammatically correct and not add any words or phrases of your own. It is even harder to tell your own story through somebody else's words. What's rewarding is that you can turn the original into its opposite if you wish. Though, in this particular case, I feel guilty - I used an excellent educational article (with which I fully agree) and turned into something quite different.

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