Step One:  Type a phrase into a search engine.

Such as “the last time I saw Beth” 

*****

Step Two:  Copy the interesting search results.

Beth Lochtefeld

The last time I saw Beth was in the Nantucket airport I was engrossed in reading trashy magazines as she bounced into the little shop telling the woman …
www.summerinternships.com/BethLochtefeld/guestbook.php – 47k – Cached – Similar pages

lmharnisch: Blogging the Wolfe Book, The Lady in Red

And I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles, and tell my minister, too—that was the last time I saw Beth Short. I did not kill her!’” Herald-Express, Jan. 20, 1947 …
lmharnisch.blogspot.com/2006/03/blogging-wolfe-book-lady-in-red.html – 37k – Cached – Similar pages

harrypotterfanfictioncom 50000 Harry Potter stories and podcasts

… I pushed open my window and just sat there looking out into the summer night Almost two summers ago was the last time I saw Beth July 31st would mark my …
harrypotterfanfiction.com/printerfriendly.php?mode=chapter&object=180048 – 16k – Cached – Similar pages

harrypotterfanfiction.com :: 50000 Harry Potter stories and podcasts

Almost two summers ago was the last time I saw Beth. July 31st would mark my second year as a known witch. The thought chilled me. …
www.harrypotterfanfiction.com/viewstory.php?chapterid=180048 – 25k – Cached – Similar pages More results from www.harrypotterfanfiction.com »

Truth and Beauty Bombs View topic People who no longer post as …

I am kind of sad because the last time I saw Beth some people said insensitive things and she got pretty mad I hope that’s not the way she remembers TaBB …
www.truthandbeautybombs.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=7264&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=60&sid… – 102k – Cached – Similar pages

Bemused Musings from Baltimore: And Then There Were Cicadas

That night was the last time I saw Beth. Of course, I mean alive. I see her everywhere. The first time I saw the trailer for the film version of “Mamma Mia …
bemusedmuse.blogspot.com/2008/07/and-then-there-were-cicadas.html – 88k – Cached – Similar pages

Philippine Elections » Yet another analysis of Pacman’s loss

The last time I saw Beth she told me, What a good feelling she feel helping other even in a small way. As for me I’ve send alot of them to school. …
blogs.inquirer.net/philippineelections/2007/05/22/yet-another-analysis-of-pacmans-loss/comment-page-8/ – 71k – Cached – Similar pages

pretty maids – Google Books Result

by Pat Patterson – 2007 – Fiction – 276 pages
The last time I saw Beth . . . she was at the Moulin Rouge.” The Moulin Rouge was one of Atlanta’s premier nightclubs that catered to the refined gentleman, …
books.google.com/books?isbn=1430322721…

Class Notes — Cohort B 1992

… first child — at least that’s my assumption based on her state of pregnancy the last time I saw Beth… Congratulations to Beth and her handsome husband! …
www.karenlevine.com/Wharton/ – 152k – Cached – Similar pages

***** 

Step Three:  Paste the interesting results onto a single page.

The last time I saw Beth was in the Nantucket airport I was engrossed in reading trashy magazines as she bounced into the little shop

And I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles, and tell my minister, too—that was the last time I saw Beth Short. I did not kill her!’”

July 31st would mark my second year as a known witch.

the last time I saw Beth some people said insensitive things and she got pretty mad

That night was the last time I saw Beth. Of course, I mean alive. I see her everywhere.

The last time I saw Beth . . . she was at the Moulin Rouge.

The last time I saw Beth, it was some night in November.

The last time I saw Beth, she was picking out Christmas cards and I didn’t want to bother her.

The last time I saw Beth, she had just found out that she was pregnant with their first child.

The last time I saw Beth she told me, “What a good feeling it is helping others even in a small way.”

The last time I saw Beth, she didn’t have a blue wig and sunglasses.

The last time I saw Beth, I was about 16 and living in Invercargill.

***** 

Step Four:  Edit the interesting results to make a poegle.

The last time I saw Beth, it was some night in November.

The last time I saw Beth was in the Nantucket airport I was engrossed in reading buried my face in a trashy magazines as she bounced into the little shop

The last time I saw Beth, I wanted to she was picking out up my Christmas cards, but and I didn’t want to bother her talk to Beth.

The last time I saw Beth, she had just found out that she was pregnant with their first child.

The last time I saw Beth she told me spotted me and said, “What a good feeling it is helping others even in a small way.”

The last time I saw Beth, she didn’t have a blue wig and sunglasses.

the last time I saw Beth some other people said some insensitive things and she got pretty mad

The last time I saw Beth, I was about 16 and living in Invercargill.

July 31st would mark my second year as a known witch.

And I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles, and tell my minister, too—that was the last time I saw Beth Short. I did not kill her!’”

That night was the last time I saw Beth. Of course, I mean alive. I see her everywhere.

The last time I saw Beth . . . she was at the Moulin Rouge.

*****

Step Five:  Read your poegle.

The Last Time I Saw Beth

It was some night in November, in the Nantucket Airport. I wanted to pick up my Christmas cards, but I didn’t want to talk to Beth. I buried my face in a trashy magazine as she bounced into the little shop. She had just found out that she was pregnant with their first child. She spotted me and said, “What a good feeling it is helping others even in a small way.” She didn’t have a blue wig and sunglasses. Some other people said insensitive things, and she got pretty mad. I was about 16 and living in Invercargill. July 31st would mark my second year as a known witch.

*****

That’s it!  Try it at home.  Or, read more Poegles here.

Stanley Fish on plagiarism in the New York Times

What about questions like, “What’s the meaning of life?” or “Is there a God?” or “Should I kill my dog?”

More

Peter Orlovsky, Poet and Ginsberg Muse, Dies at 76

“Peter Orlovsky, who inspired Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, with whom he had a romantic partnership for decades, and who wrote emotionally naked, loopy and occasionally luminescent poetry of his own, died in Williston, Vt., on Sunday. He was 76, and lived in St. Johnsbury, Vt.”

More in the NY Times

More in the Advocate

Gary Sullivan gets a pointillist portrait in the Wall Street Journal, which featured last week an article on Flarf vs Conceptual poetry.  Quoth the Journal:

Flarf is a creature of the electronic age. The flarf method typically involves using word combinations turned up in Google searches, and poems are often shared via email. When one poet penned a piece after Googling “peace” + “kitty,” another responded with a poem after searching “pizza” + “kitty.” A 2006 reading of it has been viewed more than 6,700 times on YouTube. It starts like this: “Kitty goes Postal/Wants Pizza…”

More

An introduction to the 21st Century’s most controversial poetry movements.

BY KENNETH GOLDSMITH

Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry. Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard? And what fun to wreck it: knock it down, hit delete, and start all over again. There’s a sense of gluttony, of joy, and of fun. Like kids at a touch table, we’re delighted to feel language again, to roll in it, to get our hands dirty. With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let’s just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?

More at Poetry Foundation

Here are some ideas for finding a focus for your poem:

–A “New York Times found poem” can be composed of words and phrases taken from one Times article, past or present, or several. You can mix and combine these words and phrases into a new piece, or you might simply “find” some Times writing that you feel is already poetic, as Alan Feuer does with “Missed Connections” posts on Craigslist.

–Your poem can be on any topic or theme you like. For instance, it could be about something as broad as politics, music or travel, or it might celebrate something as specific as Lady Gaga, Philadelphia or the iPad.

–Your poem might focus on something currently in the news, whether health care reform, the World Cup, bullying, the Large Hadron Collider or therecession — or you might use the Times archives or our On This Day in History feature to create a poem about an event in the past.

–You could also explore a trend you’ve read about in The Times, such as the local food movement or the effects of technology on contemporary life. Or you might simply collect words and phrases from different articles around a theme, like “identity,” “loss,” or “joy.”

“Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, ‘also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.’ He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.

“‘Who owns the words?’ Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. ‘Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.’”

NYT