Found poetry challenge: build a poem entirely from phrases you overheard this week

[Mark7]

A different sort of prompt this month. Found poetry, where the raw material is not invented but collected, and your source is the week around you. Overheard fragments on the bus, a sign in a shop window, the automated announcement, the thing a child said at a bus stop, your job is arranging, not inventing

The rules, every line must be something you genuinely heard or read out in the world this week, you may trim and repeat lines but not add your own words, maximum 16 lines, and include a one line note afterwards about where the strangest fragment came from because the sourcing stories are half the pleasure

The craft point hiding in the game, arrangement IS authorship. Two of you could collect the same ten fragments and build entirely different poems, the meaning lives in the ordering, the breaks and what you leave out, which is a truth about all poetry wearing a party hat

Notebooks and phone notes at the ready then, the world is already writing, your week is the anthology, go and harvest it

[Rebecca86]

Already collecting and can report the self checkout machine is the most prolific poet in my town, unexpected item in the bagging area is doing enormous metaphorical work

[Inland Aidan]

The automated announcements are a goldmine, see it, say it, sorted has a rhythm most of my deliberate lines never achieve and I resent the transport network for it

[QuantumLeap53]

Sourcing story ahead of my entry, an elderly man at the market said well the pigeons have to live somewhere with such weariness that I have built the whole poem around it

[NinaVrina]

The pigeons have to live somewhere is a finished poem already, the rest of your lines are just the frame

[CodyRhodes]

Craft question for the thread, does punctuation count as adding words? I want a question mark the original speaker did not intend and I feel the ethics committee should rule

[BlackMamba35]

Ruling, punctuation is arrangement not addition, bend the fragment, do not break it. The comma is the poet's only legal weapon in this game

[Ava12]

Collected all week as instructed and the humbling discovery is that strangers at bus stops are consistently better at dialogue than I am after a decade of trying

[ReacherBadger]

That discovery is the secret syllabus of the whole exercise, welcome to found poetry, it ruins your ego and improves your ear in the same week

[Wardlow]

First fragment logged from a child outside the school, the moon is following us again, and honestly the professionals can all go home

[MJF_Fan]

Children and drunk people are the two great unpublished schools of poetry and this challenge is their anthology at last

[Kai_37]

Sixteen lines assembled from one launderette, one pharmacy queue and a wrong number phone call, posting tonight, the wrong number provides the ending and I feel slightly guilty about how good it is