Stalking Poems

Ahhh. . . food coma. WOS and YNSHC just got back from "Fuddruckers": All we're saying is, half-pound Kobe bacon cheeseburger! 'Nuff said.

But we are not here to plug some commercial enterprise like Fuddruckers--even if Fuddruckers does have delicious hamburgers. No, we will say the same thing whether Fuddruckers ever becomes a solipsistic sponsor or not. Of course, if Fuddruckers were to sponsor "The Solipsist," we could probably guarantee that such comments would receive prominent placement in all future blog posts. We're just saying.

But today what's on our mind is found poetry: little nuggets of linguistic wisdom that just pop up from time to time. Years ago, when the Solipsist was a writing tutor in New York, he helped an Asian student who was struggling mightily with the English tongue. She was writing a paper about coming to the United States. The paper was rife with grammatical errors, and YNSHC was having difficulty even figuring out the gist of the paper. All of a sudden, stuck almost randomly in the middle of a paragraph, was this:

"Being an American is easy. Living in America is hard."

We were floored! Parallelism! Irony! We almost fell out of our seat. We praised the student's probably unintentional display of linguistic virtuosity and recommended that she just scrap everything and start with those sentences! And, hell, might as well just end with those sentences, too; it wasn't going to get any better than that.

Facebook can be a source of found poetry, as well, especially the "What's on your mind" bar. Just yesterday, COS--not to be confused with COS (Cats of Solipsist), or COS, who told us about RunPee.com--this is her brother, another Cousin of Solipsist--anyway, ACOS had this posted as his "status":

"Evan is wondering if the Panthers might consider Zherdev."

???

Probably some sort of hockey-sport reference. But the images it conjures! Sleek jungle denizens prowling the Amazon pondering. . . well, pondering something Russian anyway. Not to be outdone, one of ACOS's friends, responding to another post, had this wondrous bit of Dadaism: "I agree with Litter box." The odd thing is, in context, it made sense!

For more "found poetry," check out foundpoetry.wordpress.com or www.poetryteachers.com. One of our favorite examples on the latter site was by Bruce Lansky, who demonstrated that you could craft "found poetry" out of snippets from an evening newscast:

I'll love you til the end of time,

But shooting ducks should be a crime.

The Pope arrived to lead the prayers.

The Dallas Cowboys beat the Bears.

So keep your eyes out for found poetry, folks. We're collecting!