To get our creative juices flowing, we were tasked this week with ‘remediating’ a piece of artwork and turning it into something new! I’ll admit, I cheated on this one. I read the challenge brief and immediately knew what I wanted to do. Found poetry, a technique similar to the collage/cut-up method used by David Bowie to write his lyrics (BBC News 2016). But, instead of taking words from various sources and rearranging them, you take a page and work with what is there, blacking out the words that didn’t make it into your poem (Craven 2019). Typically, found poems are one page, but here I decided on four pages. Why? To be honest, the author didn’t have Nancy doing enough per page to make a poem about her.
I really loved this challenge as I have been looking for an excuse to try out found poetry for a while now but never had the time. It was tricky to achieve, and I ended up using a combination of cut-out, brainstorming and word association techniques to tie together the disparate pages. Letting go of an element of control over the process led me to three or four loose poems before Nancy made herself known.
The result turned out even better than I was hoping, as not only is it a poem I like, but it addresses the topic of weak female characters written by male authors, a problem still in fiction today. Combining the creative result with social commentary has helped me realise that believing in my subject matter really fires me up and helps me achieve better results.
If I were to do this task again, I’d probably experiment with restricting myself only to one page, as four pages did give me a lot of leeway.
References
CRAVEN, Jackie. 2019. ‘6 Ways to Turn Anything into a Found Poem’. ThoughtCo [online]. Available at: https://www.thoughtco.com/found-poetry-4157546 [accessed 1 Feb 2023].
How David Bowie used ‘cut ups’ to create lyrics – BBC News [Film]. 2016. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nlW4EbxTD8 [accessed 1 Feb 2023].
German vocabulary of the week
Poetry – Poesie