Feeling the need for something more visual than usual, I decided to go through my current notebook and take pictures of some of the scraps or bits of poetry that get pushed aside during the work-a-day writing.
When I write, I generate a lot of such lines as I see what coalesces from the scraps into a full-length poem. The by-product of my writing is that a lot of good lines get set aside. So with my tablet camera, I snapped seven of these lines up and then arranged them into something like a poem. My only arbitrary rule was to put together a seven-line poem.
What I am calling "scrap poetry" might be considered a form of collage poetry, though with less focus on an artistic presentation. For my first attempt, though, I did slap on a photo I took of a pine cone in Yellowstone Park. The photographs of the lines are not very good, but I do like the handwritten character of the lines. Though my handwriting is sloppy, I recognize there is some artistic potential in the shape of the handwritten lines.
As I do more of this, I want to experiment, perhaps with different media, in an effort to place the lines in a visual context. In a way, I suppose this is like haiga because it attempts to join the poetry with an image, though my primary objective in this first attempt was to find and rescue in some meaningful way the scraps of poetry that got forgotten along the way.
Let me know what you think. This was entirely experimental, so any comments are welcome.
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