Reflections on my artist residency with the Berghof Foundation 3: Creating found poems

Given a page, a poem is found by letting words jump out to meet the eyes.

Then moving up and down the page, adding words or omitting them to let a new text take shape.

A different text that echoes with the original. Forged from metaphors. Allowing the richness of multiple and implied meanings.

 Isolating the words out of the page and attending to the shape of the found poem.

Adding form and colour to re-connect the words into the new whole.

Sustained and repeated attention to each word and its position in the text – we keep the rule of reading left to right from the top, while breaking others, upending grammar, and shifting focus.

 Re-composing fragments of a careful text, inspired by the work and composed for clarity.

Choosing the force of the new.

Stranded

is a photo~poem, developed while walking on a local beach

Stranded, Lynne Cameron, 2020. Christchurch, New Zealand

strand is an old English/Norse word that refers to the part of the beach revealed as the tide goes out, that lies between high tide and low tide. As such, it is a temporary and always shifting space.

There was originally a further stanza to the poem - the choice of photo affects how many words can ‘fit’. The end result is neither poem nor photo, and both poem and photo. I am fascinated, and sometimes frustrated, by the dynamics of interaction between image and verbal meaning.

Composing feels like a process of offering affordances and attending to what emerges —