In addition to Exquisite Teens, I did another collaborative writing project during National Poetry Month.
While the teen project was just for YDR staff and the Poem of the Month contests are for poets primarily in York County, the Found Poetry Twitter Project was open to anyone with a Twitter handle. Participation wasn’t huge by any means, but I did get a couple of repeat tweeters, and there was only one tweet I couldn’t find a place for (grammatically speaking, it just wouldn’t have fit unless I added more than one transitional word, which isn’t true to the form of found poetry). I also punctuated and broke the lines/stanzas where I saw fit, since 1) the tweeters who shared lines of poetry didn’t denote the original line breaks with slashes, and 2) not all of the tweets were lines of poetry, but song lyrics or interesting phrases.Here’s the finished product, first in text form (so the hashtags aren’t so distracting), and then below in Storify form, so the actual tweets and tweeters are visible:
“Punch”
Malcolm Little kept what he could find,
unlearned the thesaurus, its ugly black & white.
Malcolm was the brother who knew my punch was aimed
at the glass jaw of supremacy.
My mouth bloomed like a cut. The nose
is the direct route to the brain and
the doorway to the consciousness:
All the rusted signs we ignore
throughout our lives, choosing
the shiny ones instead…
Our ground time here will be brief,
cold and planetary.
Say something like I’ve been
incredibly nice to you for three hours, why
are you treating me like this?
I’m like an opening
band for the sun.