It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood [Found Poetry]
The poem
It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
The happiest times were about the Other Place. ... the lovely music that came out of the box ... the delicious things to eat and drink ... the pictures that you could hear ... everything so clean ... people - living together - so jolly and happy ... Some days I find the Other Place inside myself. Some days I need a guide to an Other Place.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World ; and, Brave New World Revisited. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2004, p. 120.
What's this all about?
A colleague invited me to participate in a Found Poetry group on Facebook. The theme is, of course, pandemic. Each participant is assigned a book from a list of dystopian/pandemic themed books - we got to identify our top three selections. Had I not gotten Brave New World as my assignment, I'm not sure I would have been able to go through with it. Each day for the rest of April there will be a daily theme and we will post a poem in response. I thought I'd share them here as well as in the private chat for the group.
This is one of my all time favorite books. That said, I've not read it in a long time. I'm also finding that it's hard to focus on a book right now. I've been jumping around between books trying to find one that will stick. This creative activity as a means to engage with the book may be a fun way to get there.
Approach for today
At the start of the day I had these grand ideas of mind mapping some ideas related to the prompt and seeing if that led me anywhere interesting. As the day wore on, I fell back on the tried and true book version of a music theory drop needle test. I opened the book to a random page and told myself I'd use whatever I found on the page. It ended up being relatively easily.
Approaches I'd like to explore
There are a few ideas I'd like to pursue to try to engage my creative side. Here is what I've thought of so far:
Copying the book page and cutting out the words for the poem
Doing a black out poem
Hand lettering a poem
Using a haiku
Researching the style of a sonnet (it's been a while since I've taken any form of poetry class) and creating a sonnet
Illustrating a poem in some way that uses pictures instead of or in addition to words
Other ideas you would consider?