“I Am Your Own Forever” (Found Poem)

Explanation:

Welcome to my second project! (Sorry that it is late again, that seems to be a recurring theme at this point…) For this project, I wanted to try to do a blackout poem, also known as a found poem. I was in another one of my classes this semester when the style of poetry was mentioned and I was very intrigued. It is where you have an already existing text and manipulate it by taking specific words or phrases from it and highlighting them while blacking out or deleting others in order to make a completely different meaning from the piece of writing. I thought that would be a good unessay for my last project in this class and it was fun putting it together. The first thing that came to my mind about what I could do a found poem for was Othello.

I immediately thought about a number of scenes that I could use, but ultimately settled on Act 3 Scene 3, specifically the last part from lines 378 to 546. This scene is the pivotal one where it starts out with Othello not thinking that there is much going on with Desdemona but by the end of it, is vowing to kill her. All because of Iago’s manipulation. It is an intense and complex scene, but one of the lines that stood out to me the most when first reading it was the final line “I am your own forever”. It’s a declaration from Iago while the two are kneeling on the floor as Othello is giving a “vow”. Even though they are talking about murdering people, it still seems romantically coded and threw me off at first read.

At first, I thought for my found poem it might be fun to change some of Iago and Othello’s dialogue back and forth to insinuate a romantic interest between the two of them during this scene. But after attempting it and failing, I realized trying to keep both of their points of view in the poem was too difficult and would be way too long if I did somehow manage to make it work. So I instead decided to make one long poem from an anonymous perspective about being in love with someone else. As the reader, you can imagine anybody in the place of the person writing the poem and anybody in the place that they are writing the poem about.

Actually putting together the found poem was harder than I initially thought it would be. I was essentially scanning through lines, trying to find things that would match together to be something romantic or sappy. There were several times when I was inspired by a few words and thought of good lines that I was excited about doing, but then I was short one word to have the line make sense. Because I had to make sure that the words I took out were still readable, the lines all had to follow one another in order of reading right-to-left and down as usual. So sometimes I saw a word I could use but it wasn’t in the right place for me to utilize properly. It made it so I had to do a lot of little tinkering and redoing stuff that didn’t fit.

On the other hand, there were some lines that were much easier to put together. If you are just scanning words from the scene without knowing the context, it is crazy how many romantically-associated words I could find and use. “Merry”, “kisses”, “sweet”, “eternal”, “heaven”, “passion”, “reason”, “kind”, “fate”, “dream”, “gift”, “fond”, “vow”, “ever-burning”, and “love”. There were so many “loves” it was kind of ridiculous. There were also a couple of lines that barely had anything deleted from between them but worked well, as if it was already there waiting to be highlighted. And then there was the final line, “I am your own forever”, that needed no tinkering whatsoever in order to sound romantic. 

I think this project answers the question “why does your response to literature matter” in the way that the found poem shows how much you can read between the lines, this case being quite literal. So much of what you get from literature won’t necessarily be upfront. It may be a reach to say that there was romantic or queer coding between Iago and Othello during this scene, but it still matters because readings like that demonstrate the different perspectives and ideas that can coexist in one text. Words on their own each hold individual meanings and associations depending on the person and so with any text you can find something other than the obvious presentation. Also that each person can read the same text and get something different from it. It is so cool to think about how someone else could do a found poem of this exact same scene and come up with something completely unique.