My First Visual Found Poem

Natalie Solmer (editor at the Indianapolis Review) and I have a common interest,

History of Egypt!

I wrote an Egyptian themed graphic poem, "Spaceflight Sonata P2", in her magazine, and we also exchanged our thoughts on "Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb" by Netflix.

Egyptian culture inspires me all the time.

Lúcia Leão (Brazilian writer & translator) and I recently visited an exhibition, "Life and Afterlife in Ancient Egypt", at the Art Institute of Chicago.

After the exhibition, a Do Not Bend envelope containing a visual poem from Natalie Solmer was in the mailbox.

I love this type of coincidence.

Left: Natalie Solmer's Art, Right: the Art Institute of Chicago Visitor Guide

I decided to make a paper doll because I received her beautiful artwork after I shipped one origami girl to her. ​I used her art and part of an art institute floor guide for a new collage (above).

*Here is another Warashibe Choja moment.

Natalie Solmer, Feb 2022

I cut out her words from the source material and created my own sentence mimicking Egyptian ancient culture. Her original text is:

Butterfly Weed Hello
Tiger Eyes
Swept Off My Feet
Even Powers
to Offer
Life
​Through Heavy Clay Soil

My final product was built from words and phrases from the above text and reconstructed by shaffling those words. This is a found poetry. (I reviewed Nazifa Islam's found poems in RHINO Reviews.)

Naoko Fujimoto's Visual Found Poem

I collaged (glued) words on both sides of the kimono, and used, "Statue of Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, Ptolemaic Period (332–30 BCE)" in the obi-belt. I cut the image out of other commercial material from the Art Institute of Chicago.

Statue of Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, Ptolemaic Period (332–30 BCE)

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Another Visual Found Poem

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GLYP(Y), Visual Found Poem by Naoko Fujimoto

glypy? who?