Night Flight

experiments in found poetry

Or, if we want to be formally official about it, found poetics.

An experimental, or hybrid creation of storytelling, the form it ultimately takes is often a fusion of both the symbolism and urban poetic movements of the late 1960's. In 2017, found poetry has several applications, from the creative, artistic endevour, to, believe it or not, an increasingly popular application that is used to augment or situate social science academic research in a specific context. In my day job as a public health researcher, found poetics has become an invaluable methodology we often utilize to capture, document, and provide a secondary narrative of the lived experience of our research subjects.

For a more detailed explanation of that specific usage:

Poetics & Narrative In Public Health Research

For our usage here, “found poetry” has two main forms.

1. a collection of several extracts of personal and / or political prose, juxtaposed against each other to create a new and distinct narrative and theme.
2. Extracting random words from an otherwise complete text or poem, then creating a new and thematically distinct poem that stands alone, having little or no connection to the original piece.

Here, I will attempt the latter method using one of my favorite theatrical monologues. Harper’s Monologue is a short piece of narration taken from one of the last scenes in the epic Tony Kushner stage play Angels In America: Perestroika. Harper Pitt, a naive, Valium popping Mormon housewife, delivers the monologue on a plane at 35, 000 ft. after finally walking out on her closeted gay husband. Her powerful words are both a rumination on human potential, and the enduing capacity of love acting as an agent of transformation and change.

Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.

In the image below, reading from left to right, top to bottom, and highlighted in red are the words I’ve selected that form the new, independent work. One with a somewhat darker interpretation.

The final poem with intentional formatting:

Night flight on a
plane air ragged
torn, frightening.

I could see souls
dead, perished
from the plague
they departed
the souls.

Molecules, stuff
lost forever, a
painful longing
left dreaming
at least.

In 2006 Allan Rae left a career as a flight paramedic to obtain his MFA in creative nonfiction. Today he is a qualitative public health researcher exploring the intersections of HIV, PTSD, and stigma, through personal and community narrative. Allan is also the editorial lead for creative nonfiction at daCunha. Starbucks, satire, and dogs do not displease him.