A local writer is celebrating National Poetry Month starting today with a creative challenge to cut-and-paste art into art.
Andrew Milewski, a University of Scranton senior from Jefferson Twp., is one of 85 poets from seven countries who will post a new poem online each day in April made from words he has gleaned from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel or short story collection. Mr. Milewski is mining James A. Michener's 1947 collection "Tales of the South Pacific" for the found poetry project called Pulitzer Remix.
The poems will be posted on the project website: www.pulitzerremix.com.
Found poems are mostly or entirely assembled from outside texts, but the rules of the form largely end there. The Found Poetry Review, the journal sponsoring the project, says the publication celebrates "the poetry in the existing and the everyday." It borrows a definition of the genre from the Academy of American Poets, which calls found poetry "the literary equivalent of a collage."
"Typically, the rules are you can change verb tense. You can add an article if you want. But you really can't change the actual verb or the actual noun," Mr. Milewski said. "Prepositions are a little sticky."
The art is in the arrangement. For the Pulitzer Remix project, the participating poets are tasked with creating something new with their borrowed phrases rather than repeating the themes of the novel they are working with. Poets can use different methods like physically cutting and rearranging texts or blacking out words on the manuscript page to make a poem from the phrases left behind.
With Mr. Michener's book about the U.S. Navy in World War II, Mr. Milewski was careful to honor the linked stories' tone in his own work.
"I want to respect the words that he's put there," he said.
Most of the poems Mr. Milewski had in his close-to-final draft on Friday were arranged from phrases that were drawn from one story instead of ranging across the whole book. One poem was built solely from vernacular phrases said in conversation by an African-American character in the book's final short story.
Mr. Milewski said he likes the interplay between a source text and the resulting poem, where the meaning of reassembled words and phrases can be entirely changed or haunted by their original context.
"Words carry weight with them," he said. "Words have meaning and history and phrases do, too. I'm just seeing how those phrases work together."
Contact the writer: llegere@timesshamrock.com