From the Front Page
Seamus Heaney's Selected Works. ©SavannahDanielleDodd
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Contents pages and indexes. In poetry collections, these are just simple lists of titles, often overlooked. But amidst the constituents and divisions, perhaps there is more poetry to be found that we are missing... Guest curator Chris Jenkins is interested in the poetry hidden in the contents, and is looking for your found poems: "The idea of making poems from the Contents pages of poetry books came to me as I was skimming through an old copy of Larkin’s Selected Poems. In a remote little cottage in Donegal that stank with the chemical hang of firelighters and partially scorched cold wood, I found myself scanning the contents page, wondering about the thought processes around how people structure poetry books. "I started drawing out poems from these Contents pages. I soon realised that you can get some very strange, cryptic, abstract, funny, surprising, and occasionally profound results. "When looking for poems I don’t tend to edit or skip lines from a block of titles that I select. But the method isn't important, I just pick something that, for whatever unknown reason, talks to me. It doesn’t work in every book, but you never know what you may find! "So, for the sake of curiosity, a love for words, a love for the abstract, and a love for the unintentional, get exploring those contents pages. I hope you enjoy the process, and please send any of your discoveries my way. " Submit your poems found on the front page below. Every couple of weeks we'll put together a selection of contributions and will publish them on here. |
Examples from Selected Poems by Philip Larkin Spring. Deceptions. I remember, I remember. Absences. from Little Wanderer by Jennifer Horne Navigation Two Redbirds A Neighbourhood of Birds After the Storm Sound Over Water from The Blue Book by Owen Sheers When You Died Like Sowing Seed I sometimes wish that we had fought from Parallax by Sinéad Morrissey Last Winter A Matter of Life and Death Signatures Through the Eye of a Needle from Rain by Don Patterson The Bowl-Maker. Miguel. Verse. Phantom. The Rain. |
