C1 2 B1 was in response to the Orders Up prompt. I went to Jeff's County Cafe on Classen, a greasy spoon I go to about once a month. The title comes from what I typically order for breakfast.
At the Comic Com was written in response to the All Ears prompt. The directions involved going to a public space and copying down as many snippets of conversation as possible, then converting that to a poem. I picked up a free paper at Jeff's and saw there was a small comic con in town on the same day, and decided to go. One thing that's unique about this poem is that it has embedded PSAs; I'm very pleased the editors let them stand.
A Monk and His Book was drawn from Mark Twain's first book, The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrim’s Progress; the word bank was derived by phone number, as described in the Dialed In prompt.
Blue Earth People was derived from a page from Desert Notes by Barry Lopez. The Click Trick prompt is an erasure variant using Photoshop (or equivalent) to obscure unwanted words. The resulting poem makes Lopez sound like a cranky misanthropic anthropologist.
Family is a Gift forced me to get some exercise and fresh air by walking in random directions around my neighborhood. I wrote down as many words as possible on this "Chance Walk". I remindend myself that many cars names can serve dual purpose as nouns or verbs (e.g., dart). The poem has an embedded ad for the burger joint down the street from my house (technically, a link to its Twitter feed). The title comes from a sign on the door of an abandoned house.
The As Advertised prompt challenged the poet to use notices on a community bulletin board as word banks. As it turned out, my favorite bookshop (the only locally-owned new bookshop I'm aware of) didn't have many notices up. Their bulletin board is in a small entry way, so I decided it would be simplest to read the notices into an electronic device (in this case, a Samsung Tab). The device "misheard" serveral words (e.g., "yoda" for "yoga" and "sister" for "Sedaris"); I chose to preserve these "mondregreens" for this Earth Day poem.
Listening to Shame was derived from Krista Tippett's On Being interview with Brené Brown. This was in response to the Quiet on Set prompt; my reading of the directions caused me to keep many phrases intact. I received a positive response to one of those phrases; it's not a verbatim quote (which would've been breaking the rules), but it's darn close.
Another poem which seems very beholden to its source material is Rise Up Young Heart, which comes from a meditation by Bp. Steven Charleston. He graciously granted me limited permission to re-purpose his writing. I haven't decided whether to reprint it here; it seems at best an abridged version of his original work. This was done in response to the Cut It Out prompt, where the poet literally cut out the unwanted words and phrases with an exacto knife. I thought the scan of the document would be more interesting if I put a picture behind the page.
Hard Without Glasses was in response to the Best Laid Plan prompt. The text comes from “The Alcoholic Veteran with the Washboard Cranium”, a remembrance by Henry Miller. Not sure this is entirely successful, but it was worthy experiment.
Beautiful Renewal is the last poem written in response to one of the official prompts. Since I was going to miss two prompts, I decided to revisit one of the prompts I'd already completed (one of the Badge Masters did the same thing). I simply revisited Substitute Texter, since my previous attempt had been relatively successful. The substitutions for this poem were chosen at random from words left over from the Cut It Out prompt; inspired by the work of P.F. Anderson, I decided to construct this as a pantoum.
I only had to create one more "found poem" to have written 30 poems in 30 days, so I set my own challenge, which appears immediately below (Psalm 4: Lord of the Exploding Universe). The result is sort of a cross between the Substitute Texter and Interloper prompts, since I exchanged some words from the sermon for words in the psalm.
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