Category: Found Poems

Found Poems, Poetry

Solitude

Shelly

World's smarmiest poem improved. #fixedthatforyou//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Solitude

Laugh,
Weep, and
Sing,
and the hills will answer;
echoes bound to seek you;
they turn and go.
and you lose them all.

This may be the smarmiest poem ever written. Ella Wheeler Wilcox was the ultimate Pollyanna, which annoys the crap out of me. I do love to “fix” her poems, though. I like to think of it as posthumous editing. Someone really should have told her that less is more.

Found Poems, Poetry

A house with human hands built

Shelly

A house with human hands built

A house
with human hands built
lay now underwater
salt and weeds, all
eternally hidden
Glass Sun invisible.
It had been there for a long time
Centuries
the dwelling place
of wisdom and sacrifice
blossomed into thorn.

So. I was trolling around in my Amazon recommendations, like ya’ do, and up popped Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Mists of Avalon.” I read the book when I was a kid, on the glowing recommendation of a neighbor who was getting her masters in English Lit. It passed for “pretty good” at the time. She was no Mary Stewart (a comparison that folks on Facebook are quick to point out and which I agree with). Then I reread the book, a few years back. To be charitable, it did not hold up well. It is every damn thing I loathe about feminist earth goddess worship woo. Every. Damn. Thing. And it was crap, and not very well written crap, either. Cringe-inducing, ham-fisted crap that takes itself way too seriously.

I wondered, looking at the book on Amazon, how it got so damn many five-star reviews. Are the reviewers all 12 year olds? If so, I think their bad taste can be excused. I doubt it, though. I posted about my befuddlement on Facebook, and a friend directed me to this page.

I was gobsmacked. I had no idea Marion Zimmer Bradley was a child molester. I think I may have read about her ex-husband being involved in NAMBLA and being convicted of child molesting, but I didn’t know MZB was involved or to what extent. I’m gobsmacked. But also, thinking back on some of the passages in Mists of Avalon (I’ve not read any of her other books), with this knowledge, they take on a new and horrifying aspect.

The bottom line is that this is not a book I want in my house. I also don’t want to pass it on to a thrift store. What to do? I guess I’ll tear out pages and make poems with them. That’s the best way I know to exorcise contemptible ghosts.

Found Poems, Poetry

Found Poem

Shelly

Found Poem

In succession,
each
a complete turn.
First the bloom,
raised bodily,
then the snake
alive.
A warning
on its way.

This is from an old book I found in a junk shop. It was falling apart, and I paid maybe $1.00 for it? I bought it with the intention of cannibalizing it for art, and also because of the title. Pick, Shovel and Pluck: Further Experiences “With the Men who do Things.” Yes. Men who do things. How could I resist that?!