Another landmark on the road to feeling more like myself: I submitted a poem this weekend! True, I didn’t write a poem this weekend, but instead, I dusted off a poem from my notebooks and sent it off to The Found Poetry Review, a journal I discovered recently when I realized the founder and I are both taking ModPo together (though she’s probably not as far behind on the reading as I am).

I submitted a cento, a form I have experimented with before and find to be intriguing. Coincidentally, “cento” comes from the Latin for “patchwork,” so perhaps my blog title gives me a special connection to this form! However, found poetry can come from all kinds of sources: advertisements, manuals, old magazines, dictionaries, product packaging, etc. I think my next experiment might come from cookbooks, but Twitter or spam emails/comments might be fun sources too. FYI: the Found Poetry Review Twitter account has this to say: “Found poetry sources usually used poorly: song titles, Craigslist ads, book spines.” If you want more tips, here’s a great how-to piece. This can also be a fun teaching tool; I once had freshmen write found poems from different chapters of The Catcher in the Rye.

While submitting these days often involved nothing more than writing an email or attaching a document, I’m choosing to see it as a small flag of progress, or perhaps, a dormant part of myself showing signs of vitality again.

Related articles

• Form for All: Collage and the Art of the Cento (dversepoets.com)