Walking Together What Remains

This found poem is built from language in roadside garbage (specifically “pieces that had been in people’s mouths”) found and selected by Chris Green during a 30 minute walk during the first day of Spring in the year 2000. The lines composed from this fascinating set of constraints are a snapshot of what litterbugs in central Kentucky were eating in their cars or as they walked by a road— a kind of poetic ethnography. Each line of this poem is superposed over an artistic photograph that shows a portion of the found object and contains a footnote for each describing the object in the photograph and poetic line. The interface is a horizontally scrolling slideshow on a brief timer (that pauses while you place the pointer over the footnote), evoking the sequential structure of a walk. One fascinating aspect of this poem is how the punctuation between lines creates relations between the lines that might otherwise be lost, given an interface that promotes individual attention to each “slide.” (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)