Saturday, June 16, 2007

Altered Book Poetry

http://www.logolalia.com/alteredbooks/

While searching on the topic "altered books" this morning, I found this site. Writers take book pages and create found poetry. No rubber stamps, collage skills, or art papers required. Really. It's a great writing idea. Poetry from book pages. I think kids would love it. It makes me want to tear pages out of books and color them with crayons.

Since I don't get to present a morning pages during SI, indulge me and go to this site.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Megan,

Wave Books has an online version of this, sort of. They have samples of text, and they invite you to alter them. It's sort of like a video game, but not, interactive, might be a better word.

They are at:

http://erasures.wavepoetry.com/index.php

arthur said...

I do a workshop that I call Ransom Notes where the students do what Megan describes. I have had a lot of success with it. Except, they sometimes get a little too resourceful in finding pages, lines, words, and letters to use. There are a lot of chopped up National Geographics in our hallway (the "library").

It creates interesting discussions around the notion of plagiarism; we talk a lot about the difference between imitation (Greeks practiced "imitatio")and what it means to steal someone else's work.

My favorite workshop is Pirate Poems where the kids take a poem by someone else and write every other line themselves. Poe has been one of my most successful sources for this. My kids love all things dark, dramatic, and gothic.
Alas, so do I.
-- Will

arthur said...

P.S. Arthur is the name of my cat.

-- Will S

Megan B. said...

Thanks to both of you. I've already explored the site you've suggested, Jack, and found it inspiring. And I can definitely incorporate Will's poetry ideas into my own demo practice. -Megan