The Evidence Room

[Closed] a found poetry collaboration

Photo by Peggy and Marco Lachmann-Anke (Pixabay)

I suppose you’ve noticed some strange happenings over in the Flash Fiction Train. Sort of hard to miss, I guess. But with this new project, we’re not looking at the big picture. We want to see your attention to detail in action.

The Evidence Room is where you’ll find small poems that lay hidden in the Flash Fiction Train…that is, they were hidden until our poets came along to uncover them.

No idea what we’re talking about? Read up on it in this excellent, short explanation of found poetry:

About Found Poetry

How to play

1. Choose a single story from the Flash Fiction Train to work with. You can play as many times as you want, but just using one story at a time.
2. This is the fun part: find the poem using the erasure or cut-up methods. We ask that you don’t use the cento method or free-form excerpting and remixing for this project, to make it easy for us to verify attributions. (But you should feel free to experiment with these methods and send them to other publications, like Poetry in Form or Poets Unlimited.)
3. Transcribe your poem as a new story on Medium and give it a title. You can take this from the source story, or create your own title.
4. For your subtitle, use after <@originalwriter> [[TK: Tamyka]].
   (The first half of that is so the flash fiction writer gets due credit, and the rest just alerts our editors that this piece is for Tamyka.)
5. Add an image near the top and give it an attribution. At a minimum, we expect the artist’s name and a link. (See the photo at the top of this story for an example.) If you’ve found your poem on a printout of the source story, you could snap a photo to use as your featured image. Or create the same effect digitally, using a screen-capture of the original story.
6. At the bottom of your poem, put a separator, then add:
   This poem is part of The Evidence Room, a found poetry collaboration on Chalkboard. I found this poem in:
   <enter the link on a separate line and hit return to create an embed-link to the flash fiction piece>
7. Tag your post with The Evidence Room and any other tags that take your fancy.
8. Now you’re ready to submit!
   (a) If you’re not yet a writer for Chalkboard, respond to this story and ask us to add you to our list. (Tag Andy Meyer or Tamyka Bell if you don’t hear from us within 48 hours.)
   (b) Once you’re a writer for Chalkboard, submit your found poem to the publication as a draft.
   (c) A Chalkboard editor will check your story and publish it. You should receive a Medium notification once it’s published, unless you’ve turned off notifications.
9. Optional, after we’ve published: if you’re feeling cheeky, you can go back to the source story, highlight a paragraph in which you found your poem, and leave a response like “I found a poem in here — thank you!” with a link to your published poem.

You can even turn your found poem into artwork, unless you’re a terrible artist like Tamyka. (Source: Google Images)