Well, it wasn't exactly "found," as if I picked it up from a Safeway parking lot like a lost nickel. First I had to select and recognize the poetic potentiality of a text—in this case a quotation by Mark Tobey. Then I had to cut out the words, push them around interminably on a tabletop until I liked the way they looked and sounded, and finally glue them to this paint sample card.
If you consider that before that, I had to travel to the hardware store to get the paint sample card and go to the Seattle Art Museum for the Pacific Northwest Modernism show where I picked up the catalogue in which I found the original Mark Tobey quote, this poem actually took a lot more time and effort and was a lot more difficult to "write" than if I'd just dreamed it up out of the clear blue sky in the manner that most conventional poetry is composed. I could have done the latter without getting out of bed!
"Found" poem, my ass!
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