Mine or yours or ours?

I've nurtured a love-hate relationship with found poetry for a long while now, so it was quite surprising when I found myself writing a found poetry series. Even more unusual was that I felt, from the very beginning, 100% certain that I was going to use that found poetry series as the foundation for a poetry/visual art installation. After our return to the States from the Southeast Asia trip in Jan2007, I knew almost immediately (even before the worship at PSR was planned) that I needed to write a poetry series based upon our trip. I even knew that I wanted to use the reflections that the trip participants had written -- use them as material from which the poems would be crafted.

All this knowing wasn't really "knowing," though. Much like how we intuit our way around a dark room, I was intuiting my way through this process of writing found poems. I resisted the urge for such a long while because, deep down inside, I've always felt the poems would not really be my poems, that they would always be Person X's poems. When we think of craft and aesthetics, when we think of subjects, how can we say that culling a poem (fully sprung or not) from some other text qualifies as writing poetry from the depths of our felt experience?

What I realized, however, as I moved through revision after revision, was that the poems are my own. They are completely different from the very first version that included the original texts. The sense of the poem, the heart-essence of the poem, even the rhythm and feel of the poem are all new and special and unique. I feel thoroughly justified, satisfied, and fulfilled in calling them my own for they are so different in manifestation and forms that I can hardly recognize them.

When writing about craft, I'll have to be more precise. For the time being, I can only say I am learning to live with the poems as they are... whether found or unfound.