“Lip of the Well”

This week our Found in the Public Domain series features “Lip of the Well” by Karen L. George, composed with words from Emily Dickinson’s poem 460.

About the poem and the process of creating it Karen says:

“I’ve become addicted to writing found poems. It’s just one way to honor the poets whose work speaks to me—in this case Emily Dickinson, and so I also tried to use capitalization in the non-standard way she did. My process for writing found poems is to write words from the source on a separate paper, and scan those words, say them aloud, until I zero in on one word, then another, until images arise that I write on a blank page. When they begin to interact, I modify, rearrange and shape these images into a poem. I find writing found poems satisfying because they often lead me into places I might not have gone before.”