First, I’d like to thank everyone who participated in this brave and curious venture. Here’s our collaborative found poem made by putting together all the individual pieces.

The poems were absolutely lovely, and stood alone very nicely indeed (you can see them on the wakelet at the bottom of this post). This also means that it was difficult / impossible to try to put them together in ways that didn’t dilute the intriguing possibilities of the originals. 

Particular kudos to Amanda for presenting a perfect line of iambic tetrameter. In non-technical terms that means four beats in the line, the stress (beat). Her poem reads: fast come that dead and somber fall (beats in bold).

Also kudos to everyone for the amazing visuals! They were all beautiful, but I particularly loved the torn out words from lighthouse creative therapy. The fonts and assemblage gave the found poem a kind of vintage/reflective feel.

I’m going to present three versions of collaborative poetry from our informal collective of #CreativeSummer20. You can read them below. One uses all our lines, but the others have more editing. I’ve added punctuation to two but left one closer in spirit to the original cut out words, using lower caps and spacing to suggest where pause-points might be.

Let me know which ones you prefer, and do come up with your own, too and if you post to twitter with the hashtag I’ll share here.