Found Poem

Having written an incredibly unsuccessful villanelle in the past, I decided to go for the found poem this week.  Unfortunately, my first few attempts were also incredibly unsuccessful, mostly because I was sticking so rigidly to the text that everything just sounded ridiculous and uninteresting.  Also because the texts I kept picking were ridiculous and uninteresting.  But I have two of them here, because I'm not sure if either of them work, but they're very different and the methods by which I went about creating them are different.  And one is probably more correct than the other.

I ended up drawing first from "Shooting An Elephant" by George Orwell and possibly interpreting the directions a bit too loosely.  What struck me most about the original text were the adjectives used to describe the death of this elephant and which also seemed to describe the feelings this death evoked in the elephant's shooter.  They're incredibly strong and not at all the kind of adjectives I'd ever use in poetry, so naturally I felt compelled to use them and almost nothing else, hence the loose interpretation.

I'm not sure how successful this is.  I didn't pull out full lines, or even more than a few short phrases.  I just felt as though globbing all the adjectives together in one place instead of spread out throughout the text strengthened the experience, but I could be completely wrong about that.  Also, I'm almost certain it makes no sense outside the context of Orwell's text, and therefore probably doesn't work.

The other was pulled more directly from an op. ed. piece in the New York Times on Ron Paul's facial mishap at a debate.  Funnier, and with only very minor editing to lines (to keep it grammatically sensical).  I'm possibly not very good at humor in poetry.  Possibly because I'm not very good at humor in any writing.  But the article was so ridiculous it lent itself to an attempt at humor in a poem.