Yesterday, I mentioned loving the new visual/text novel by writer Jason Reynolds and artist Jason Griffin — Ain’t Burned All The Bright — and after reading it multiple times, I realized that if you did random flipping through its pages, a poem would almost always emerge. (I started to read the book, thanks to a shared birthday invitation from two National Writing Project friends: Bryan Crandall and Paul Hankins).
Which led me to a remix that became a found poem. (above)
The words in the poem are all from pages in the book, and the collage which I created to reference the book’s cover and the inside pages where I “found” the words is designed to celebrate and hint at the book’s beautiful pages.
I actually tried this a few different ways, with different apps and approaches, and landed on this one, which merges the words onto the image through an app that combines media in interesting ways.
Here is the poem, as text:
or the way we treat
the world
high enough to fly off
and catch air
and maybe grab some sky
and somehow even become
its own rain cloud
to see a split second
and maybe
seeing each other’s mess
as a breath of fresh airA Found Poem Remix
with appreciation for the words of Jason Reynolds and the art of Jason Griffin in ‘Ain’t Burned All The Bright’
Peace (in wonder),
Kevin