On Monday I decided to take a well earned break from all of my house cleaning, cooking, and editing of a book that I’m doing for a friend and start to peruse a few poetry groups I belong to. Many of them offer a writing challenge for the day and sometimes I do them and sometimes I don’t, but one of the challenges got me excited. It was a challenge to write Discovered Poetry.
What is Discovered Poetry you might ask? Well, it might not be as wonderful as discovering America, but it is great in its own right as far as discovery goes. It is the art of taking some ordinary words from some ordinary things, like CD covers, magazines, newspapers, or in my case, food labels, and making a poem out of them.
I admit that I was a bit leery about doing this at first because I really didn’t think I could write a poem that would make any sense from a bunch of words that were random, but I tried the challenge anyway and wrote a poem entitled Food Labels. This exercise was really quite fun. I not only enjoyed it for this poem, but I just may use this technique for future poems.
I have added the poem below so you can read it. Who knows, it may spark the poet in you to write some Discovered Poetry.
Food Labels
Fifty percent less fat
Than the regular
With no hydrogenated oils,
Preservatives or cholesterol
Stand out for attention.
Vanilla cake with
Mystery words are out of the mix.
Fair trade cup of the old Joe’s kind has perks and
Salt of the sea and sauce of the soy
With red wine, balsamic, and rice vinegar,
Make a splash in my book.
Macaroni of the bleached kind
Is now discriminated against
The dark wheat kind,
And yet some
Wheat Thins really aren’t
What they claim.
It all comes down to a label
Because nothing processed
Is something gained.
