Verbatim found poetry is an intriguing collection of found poems. Poems found in ordinary, and not so ordinary places. Submit yours.
essays, papers, research
In Algiers, you don’t talk about ‘going swimming’
but ‘knocking off for a swim’.
I won’t insist.
People swim in the harbour
and then go rest on the buoys.
When you pass a buoy
where a pretty girl is sitting,
you shout to your friends,
‘I tell you it’s a seagull’.
These are healthy pleasures.
They certainly seem ideal to the young men.
A quote from Albert Camus found in this essay. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.
This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’
The cow is a successful animal.
Also he is quadrupud, and because
he is female, he give milk, but will do
when he is got child. He is same like God,
sacred to Hindus and useful to man.
But he has got four legs together.
Two are forward and two are afterwards.
His motion is slow only because he
is of asitudinious species.
Also his other motion is useful
to trees, plants as well as making flat cakes
in hand and drying in the sun. Cow is
the only animal that extricates
his feeding after eating. Then afterwards
she chew with his teeth whom are situated
in the inside of the mouth. He is
incessantly in the meadows in the grass.
His only attacking and defending
organ is the horn, specially so when
he is got child. This is done by knowing
his head whereby he causes the weapons
to be paralleled to the ground of earth
and instantly proceed with velocity
forwards.
He has got tails also, but not
like similar animals. It has hairs
on the other end of the other side.
This is done to frighten away the flies
which alight on his cohoa body
whereupon he gives hit with it.
The palms
of his feet are soft unto the touch. So
the grasses head is not crushed. At night time
have poses by looking down on the ground
and he shouts his eyes like his relatives,
the horse does not do so. This is the cow.
(From an essay on ‘the cow’ for the Indian Civil Services Exam)
The problem of ‘ideology’ and ‘politics’
influencing statistics
affects not only their reliability
and validity,
but also their availability.
In some cases this problem was insurmountable,
and statistics on, for example,
the number of young asylum seekers,
were simply not available;
However, rather than allow the availability
of statistics – a political issue –
to shape which variables
imperative to present the findings with ‘gaps’
since, in any case, the gaps
in these statistics spoke perhaps
Verbatim Poetry 