I have nearly 50 drafts in my blog’s dashboard — waiting, forgotten, abandoned.
This week, I encouraged readers at the Daily Post, one of our blogs at WordPress.com, to sift through and revisit these unfinished posts in their dashboard. One of my suggestions to inspire creativity was to pull bits from different drafts and craft “found poetry” from this dashboard detritus.
So I’ve taken my own advice and pulled fragments from four previous drafts: two posts started this month, one begun earlier this year, and another in limbo from last spring. I was drawn to these particular drafts because they focus on time and place — and overlap in some ways.
My rules: I could pluck phrases from any draft and place them below, on any line, and within any section — but I couldn’t edit words, or the arrangement of words, within these phrases. I left capitalization untouched; I removed any final periods. I was free to repeat phrases I’d already used.
* * * * *
I’m sitting at an outdoor bistro
Thinking about now
I long for things of the past
in love with Amaro and Earlybird
contributing to instant nostalgia
I’ve been slowly falling for Los Angeles
bit by bit, trip by trip
over the past 15 years
my friend took me to breakfast
a Silverlake spot channeling the past
we talked about the ways we consume
remixing and recycling
fusing everything but nothing at once
I told her I was falling for LA
She said:
LA is whatever you want it to be
I’ve begun to understand
it is made up of many worlds
but ultimately a blank canvas
pure creation in a new place
where now happens
* * *
Instagram and anachronism
non-camera phone shots
where’s the unfolding narrative?
Why must these outliers and impostors
disrupt this collective timeline?
But I’m not saying I need to see
a picture of your lunch at 12:30
your dessert at 12:55
* * *
sifting through my Camera Roll
thousands of images not posted online
I hunt through my library
see the outtakes
and rejects of my days
the stuff I’d felt wasn’t good enough to share
yet these are the photos
unshared, unfiltered
that really tell my stories
I’ve caught myself, haven’t I?
slotting moments into a timeline that don’t belong
shaping chronology
I pluck out pictures, discard the rest
* * *
I’m sitting at an outdoor bistro
It feels close to midnight
yet the day is strong
my eyes falling
upon one of the legs of the Eiffel Tower
The leg has met the wall of a casino
an atmospheric canvas awash in blue
the first time I visited Las Vegas
I was twelve
The Mirage’s erupting volcano
Treasure Island’s pirate show
road trips in college
I first sensed what Vegas could be
not yet twenty-one
fueled on ecstasy tablets
inconspicuous swigs of vodka
I was there, but not there
I’ve returned many times since
Each visit
the city has felt different
almost new
It lets me shape it each time
I’m sitting at an outdoor bistro
drinking a cocktail, playing cards
stealing puffs from my husband’s cigarette
The bartender
tells me I have a young face
and asks for my ID
It feels odd, perhaps unnatural
to age in a place as timeless
as anachronistic as Vegas
night is masked as day
clocks nowhere to be found
But as I sit with my husband
I know time has passed
It was here that we’d met
just our third encounter
He was a traveler on holiday
I was the girl he’d met the week before
We didn’t know it then
this meeting would be the beginning
the first real moment
Vegas
as physical and tangible
a place that stays intact
that exists in the timeline of our world
Some travelers avoid revisiting a city
for fear of reshaping their memory
I’ve held my favorite places
hostage in my mind
I recently returned to Spain
I’d found my way to Mirador de San Nicolas
all so beautiful
yet I couldn’t stop thinking of the Granada
I’d encountered years ago
I quietly sat there
mentally downloaded files
recalling the very moments
Years ago
synching those two selves
I decided to stop chasing a part of myself
let go of the memories
allowed the city, instead, to reshape me
* * *
I’m sitting at an outdoor bistro
there, but not there
still thinking about now
and
things of the past
Cheri, this gave me a chill. Thank you and thank you.
Beautiful, woven, evocative. I saw author Christos Tsiolkas speak here in Melbourne last night and he spoke of the books he read and devoured as a child. Christos reminded me that my childhood loves we’re books of poetry, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Taylor Coleridge my favourites. Last night I pinched myself to remember to read more poetry … Then I found you this morning.
Thank you I love your words and images, I will return.
In my childhood days I never took much to poetry, only now in my adulthood have I discovered the power of poetry and writing poetry. This is brilliant, I love the images it describes every word you write and every image created in the mind.
I haven’t explored many of the WP Poets. Came to your blog through one of your post. Love this one. Will read more later.
Oh gosh. As a lover of found poetry (and also a blog post procrastinator — I currently have a few sitting in the Dashboard myself), this is an excellent idea. May even inspire me to actually POST one or two of those suckers.
I love your blog!!
I was captivated by that image {sculpture}. So creative and real!
I Love this! I have thought of doing this but never actually did it. Will definitely be doing this!
I really like this!!! This is a great idea, and I should look through my old sections and forgotten pieces and remnants of poems that have died, and do something creative with them. Thank you!
Cheri, that’s beautiful. Not only is this so creative but this is also quite representative of our modern existence — fragmentary, disjointed, but yet there’s poetry in it. There’s a touch of TS Eliot (though his is more dark and sordid poetry) who combined images from our multi-hued everyday living to form a blurry whole.
Brilliant idea.
Very evocative and inspiring. The concept of how you wrote it is fascinating and the piece together renders images and memories from my own past and ties them to your images and words. sometimes fragments and moments tell the best stories and have the best imagery, what you fill in is more open.
So creative! I want to try this with my old poetry :)!
Lovely photographs of Granada. Also appreciate your “About” page. Well-wrought, original. Well-done.
Wow, Cheri. I love what you’ve done here — the process and the brilliantly cohesive results. Beautifully witnessed, imagined and shot images, expressed in word and via Instagram-filtered and -framed photos. In short, inspiring! Thank you.
This is just super…..lovely idea…..so simple and yet, so deep and so many interpretations !! <3
I love this idea, it’s recyclable poetry and a tremendous tool for inspiring yourself with words that might have seemed old. I am definitely going to try this!
These are really great! Not only is the idea cool, but the results are amazing! I can’t believe they were just sitting in your dashboard all that time.
Cheers,
Courtney Hosny
This is such a wonderful idea! I really enjoyed it!
I bet it took many hours to create the Sculptures made of recycled materials at the Albany Bulb! Right?
YES!! I thought I was the only one who always forgets to finish their writing; however, I had never seen someone crafting poetry out of them. I loved it! I will try to recover my drafts – It will be hard, though, since they’re only within my brain.
You have no idea how many times I think about the unfinished draft. I love the notion of “found poetry” and what you did with it. I’ve been having inordinate trouble focusing on writing lately, leaving many thoughts incomplete. Looking forward to revisiting them and seeing how the fragments may be pieced together…
This is so amazing. I’m in love.
I have just discovered your work and LOVE it….Wowwww x
Cool post!! Former aspiring screenwriter to creative, non-fiction writer into poet.
While these may be pulled fragments, you’ve seemed to stitch these descriptive lines with great tempo and ease. Keep recycling those un seen words you’ve written.
Beautiful.
Oh, this is sooooo brilliant…love love love it. I love the idea. Love the way you have created it. Just love it all. I was writing one day and came to a block. I wandered around my room past my book shelves and saw a title then another and before long I was using random titles which fed the rest of my poetry.
So great! I have gobs of abandoned posts, drafts even finished that I never posted. A new genre is born. Thanks, Cheri.
This is truly a Kaleidoscope made of real pieces of discarded drafts, bits and pieces of memory and moments, of cities and places, of fragments of time. A composition that need not make sense necessarily and yet it does. For me, it has meaning not just because of the incidental glimpses of stories it reveals but because it tells me even unnecessary discarded bits can be arranged to make something beautiful. Everything has meaning, even the lost and the rejected. 🙂
Initially, when I had this idea, I didn’t expect for it to make sense, at least in a cohesive, satisfying way. But as I was piecing lines together — from posts that mused on very similar themes and ideas (obsessions of mine, really) — things just fell naturally into place. I’m happy with how it turned out — I think I’ll do more!
Love this so much – as others have said, thank you for the inspiration. And I only have one draft blog post but perhaps I can pull from journals if that would work.
Really enjoyed this. I don’t read nor write enough poetry…thanks for the inspiration!
Thanks, Adam! I don’t write (or read) much poetry either, but I actually enjoyed doing this and it’s encouraging me to experiment again.
I love the way your “cheat sheet” meshed to give birth to beautiful poetry! Very creative 🙂
Love this. How do you get pictures smaller within the post? I’ve never figured this out…
For this post, I used the gallery feature. Whenever I wanted to add a trio of images, I used the “default” gallery option, which displays images as small thumbnails. (Usually, I use the “tiles” or “square tiles” option, but this type worked better for this post, with the poem format and lots of white space.)
One of my favorites, Cheri. Every word. Makes me want to write.
Aw, thanks Maggie — looking forward to seeing you this summer 🙂
I love this post! I just wish I have as many drafts I can combine like you did with this post. I’d love to try my hand at this one day. I guess its time to write more drafts I can pick and choose from. =)
The Albany Bulb sculpture was the perfect “cover” for this — random pieces put together to make something fabulous.
For some reason I cannot think of a more beautiful thing than to enjoy sitting in a quiet outdoor cafe or coffeehouse. Beautiful pictures.
I love this post! It’s such a wonderful idea, and everything about it – from the feature image to the thread of time to the sense of meander-over closure at the end – just fits so perfectly.
It’s also a very revealing post, perhaps in the same way that it’s the discarded camera roll pictures that *really* tell your story.
My new favourite post for sure!
Interesting. Yes, the things we leave behind — traces, vestiges. In some ways we think they’re trash, but they’re really like artifacts and tell so much.
This is pretty brilliant! What a fabulous idea!
I love this idea, great poem! My problem is that I don’t have many drafts as I tend to go head long and try and finish something and delete whatever is unfinished….time to start keeping the drafts……
Marvellous. William Burroughs would have loved the cut-up method.
Love the flow. Really works all together like this.