Verbatim found poetry is an intriguing collection of found poems. Poems found in ordinary, and not so ordinary places. Submit yours.
I’m a patriotic husband,
you my patriotic wife,
lemme book into ya camp
and manufacture life.
Only financially secure adults
in stable, committed, long-term
relationships should participate.
(A song encouraging Singaporeans to have more babies, reported in Baby Love. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar)
Spotless Earthenware
Smiling Housewives
Clean Baths
Happy Husbands
White Marble
Contented Servants
Shining Pots and Pans
In The Parlour
Polished Stair-Rods
In The Kitchen
Bright Fire-Irons
In The Factory
Sparkling Glass-Ware
Simple!! Rapid!!
Clean!! Cheap!!
From an ad in a biography of William Lever: The King of Sunlight by Adam McQueen (Bantam Press, 2004). Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.
Let us also recognize
our own native
detachable snake-hips,
our rangy legs,
our educated feet.
Our arms and fingers
wave and snap
in a special way.
Our shoulders hang
as no other people’s
shoulders hang.
Taken from ‘Musical Myths of the American West’, by Stephen Brown, a review of two books in the Times Literary Supplement, 9 November 2012. The poem is a quotation from the writings of Lincoln Kirstein. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.
Let the nation’s doormen do their jobs without smiling
Let waiters at suburban restaurants leave their flair at home
Let the janitors at Princeton mop no vomit from the dormitory stairwells
Let retail greeters of every description call in sick
Let the first-class passengers board at someone else’s leisure
Let the nation’s limo drivers require their passengers to open their own damn doors
Let the production interns at CNBC send the on-air “talent” to fetch the coffee
And, for just one day, let the talent ask their interviewees hard questions
From the essay Servile Disobedience by Thomas Frank, February 2011. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.
“Eatin’s Cheatin’” echoes around the office on a Friday afternoon.
Women pick over their naked salads and extra extra light low fat
Philly on Ryvita. The preparations for ‘Rosé o’clock’ are well
under way.
They’ll grumble through the afternoon and suppress the urge
to be
‘naughty’ whenever anyone offers a biscuit, sweet or chocolate.
Fun.
From Drunkorexia: A stupid name, but a serious problem on the Independent blogs. Omitted words: ‘as’ (line 1) and ‘their way’ (4). Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.
Testosterone-fuelled silverbacks
eat what they kill
in under-supervised dealing rooms,
skimming fortunes
from everyone else’s endeavour.
So far the remedies are
cough drops for cancer.
Taken from Polly Toynbee’s Guardian column, Fri 6 July 2012. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.
On your tombstone
you’ve got your birth date
and the day of your decease —
and you’ve got your dash.
Live your dash.
Hold still and watch the birds.
Like the hummingbirds —
why are there so many of them?
Taken from the London Evening Standard’s review of Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss, 30th March 2012. A comma has been removed after ‘tombstone’. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.
We work and we borrow
in order to work and to borrow.
And the jobs we work toward
are the jobs we already have.
Lines from the we want everything blog – critical theory and content from the nascent California student occupation movement. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.
(after Macaulay)
All who could help or hurt at Court,
ministers, mistresses, priests, were
kept in good humour by presents
of shawls and silks, birds’ nests and
attar of roses, bulses of diamonds,
bags of guineas.
Lord Macaulay, as quoted in an article in the Economist about the East India Company, 17th December 2011. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.
Once she was born
I was never not afraid:
afraid of swimming pools,
high-tension wires,
lye under the sink,
aspirin in the medicine cabinet…
rattlesnakes, riptides, landslides,
strangers who appeared at the door,
unexplained fevers, elevators without
operators and empty hotel corridors.
(London Review of Books quoting Joan Didion’s Blue Nights. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar)
Verbatim Poetry 
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