Bookmash Poetry - A Way with Words

A Bookmash Homage to Lance 

Cutting for Stone
Hidden Power, Endurance...
My Losing Season

It's Not About the Bike: HELL TO PAY!

Several years ago we discovered an NPR radio program called "A Way with Words." I have never listened to it live on the radio, but before we take a car trip we often download programs to an mp3 player from their website for our listening pleasure. Their website is www.waywordradio.org.

It is a great program about language--words, phrases and idioms that listeners wonder about, with co-hosts Grant and Martha doing the research and providing answers to those queries in a very NPR-nice way.

The website features summaries of some of the hour-long program's recent broadcasts. I was intrigued last week by their feature on "bookmash poetry." The idea is that you take a look at the stack of books on your bedside table and discover what a clever poem the titles make. They invite you to share your best.

The examples found on their links were clever and I began to look around the house for my own "found poetry." I was devastated that none of my book titles, stacked together, made anything other than a *random stack of books with titles--but I am still looking!

For instance, the books we have read this past year in book club form this very boring (and certainly not poetic) bookmash:

Jane Eyre
The Chair
The Yellow Birds
The Only Road North
Sarah's Key

Possibly a bit better are these non-book club titles I read last year:

Love in the Time of Cholera
Eat, Pray, Love
Heaven is for Real

or         Love in the Time of Cholera:
            Eat, Pray, Love--Heaven is for Real!
    
 I will include a photo of the best that I could manage (above) with books from our main level shelves. I haven't yet checked the more ancient tomes and aging paperbacks in the basement. I plan to keep an eye "peeled" for titles that titillate, now that I know about bookmash poetry!

This is the kind of thing you can waste your time on if you are some sort of wordie like me with a little too much time on your hands.

(It is also a method for arranging books in your library--with the books making a statement!)

Can anyone offer me a verse of nice bookmash poetry from your mantle or bed stand stack? It's not fair to just make it up by going through the shelves at a library. It should be a photo of a stack from your home or office, in order to qualify as authentic "found poetry." If it is worthy, I will add it to this post or another.


*banned word, used with apology


Added 2-13-13, some family BOOKMASH POETRY:

Animal, vegetable, miracle

All creatures great and small--

Birds without wings

Floating in my mother's palm

Hot, flat, and crowded:

A tale of two cities

Gone with the wind

 

Sex and Suits,

Animal Spirits.

A State of Risk, 

On the Brink,

Naked.

Free to Choose,

A Gentlemen Gets Dressed Up

(Sex and suits is about fashion and gender, throughout history, I am told--just in case you were wondering). Such an interesting example of bookmash poetry it is--and the colors are even coordinated (dressed up)!

Thanks so much for these offerings--my belief in found poetry on the bookshelf is renewed!

2-14-13
I don't think I get this one:

Sermons from Job:
A Room with a View
To Kill a Mockingbird
(Goodnight, Mr. Tom)