Lost and Found: Tales from Colorado Springs
Lost and Found is Mood of Monk‘s new section for found poetry. They can be notes that you found on the street, that strike a resonance in your heart, or reconstructions of other text. Usually, it’s a matter of taking an everyday phrase, object, or social fragment and seeing it in a new light. Mood of Monk has always existed as a matter of providing a space for creative response, and found poetry is precisely that. It is a task which involves taking the banal and making something new from it, the same way an artist might manipulate ideology into a short story, poem, or painting.
For our first post in this area, Samuel Webster has taken the official report from the Colorado Springs Police Blotter to create a trio, Tales from Colorado Springs. For those who haven’t come across them before, the police blotter is a short public summary which covers the endeavours of the police in a certain area.
Tales from Colorado Springs
I’ve always been interested in the fluidity of language, the way that words can be twisted into different shapes, all made up of the same parts. Consider the way ‘waif and vagrant’ becomes ‘fragment wife’ through phonetic association, or the absurd truth to Barthelme’s description of a man, “his eyes either gleaming or burning – I couldn’t tell which, it was a cloudy day.”
Found Poetry of the form which follows is, in its nature, incredibly restrictive. Instead of letting the creative mind into every pocket of language, it confines the artist to a certain order, a certain vernacular, and specific words. If a phrase doesn’t exist, in its parts, in order, it cannot be used. The phrases which come are often simple, hopefully poignant in the best of circumstances, but they point to a resonance within language which gives me great hope for imagination itself.
Beyond that, the use of the police blotter itself is to add a further element to the reconstruction. Police blotter’s exist out of necessity, there is no intention to create art, or to make a statement that goes beyond the facts of the situation. The poetic process takes the necessary and creates something artistically superfluous, which perhaps exists merely for the sake of whimsy.
