Finding Poetry

Sometimes we are cleaning out boxes in the basement or going through the things pushed to the back of the closet, and we find something special, a forgotten memento of an earlier time or a favorite earring we thought was lost. Sometimes we walk along a sandy shore or hike along a mountain trail, and we find something, a perfectly formed shell or an exquisite wild flower. Finding something old can make it new again. Finding something beautiful can remind us what to cherish. These precious discoveries we find can make us look around with new perspectives. It’s similar with found poetry.

 A found poem is one that is created from an existing text. Poets take the words they find, pick and choose what words and phrases they find meaningful, move these pieces of the text around with the cadence, line breaks, and the spaces of a poem. And then they create a poem from what they’ve found. Some poets stay true to the words of the original text, and others add their own or insert their found pieces into other poems they’re writing.

 In the opening of her book, Mornings Like This: Found Poems, Annie Dillard (1995) described poets of found poems “pawing through popular culture like sculptors on trash heaps. They hold and wave aloft usable artifacts and fragments: jingles and ad copy, menus and broadcasts – all objets trouvés … by entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles. The poet adds, or at any rate increases, the elements of delight” (p. ix). I’ve tried to follow in the footsteps of these treasure hunters.

 The words of this found poem are taken from the Twitter thread #InvisiblyDisabledLooksLike. They are the words of individuals with invisible disabilities. As someone who has an invisible disability made visible, I have put these words together in order to share what it is like to live in an able-bodied world with a disability that is not readily apparent. We all are seen by those around us through different lenses, but I wonder about those pieces of ourselves that are hidden. How does what is visible and what is invisible play out in our lives? What do you share? What do you wish to keep invisible? Why do we make the choice to share or not to reveal those parts of who we are? What struggles do we face when we are not seen for who we are? I thought about these questions as I created a poem from the words that others had shared.

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#InvisiblyDisabledLooksLike