Ms. Gokturk

Trends in Literature

The Time Machine Found Poetry Assignment

"Found" poems are poems you create by “finding” text, not necessarily “creating” it. The poem is created from pieces of broken text plucked from the main text.  This is not plagiarism! The poems are original as poems; their themes and their orderings are invented. The word choices and chronology are not. Words can be dropped but not added.  This is editing at its extreme: writing without composing. Your found poem should emphasize a theme or themes from the novel.

Your Task: Have fun, be creative!
You are to develop a found poem which has the following required elements:

- find a passage(s) from The Time Machine that attracts your attention. You may combine more than one passage.

- re-write it omitting words, revising punctuation, and creating line breaks for emphasis, skipping parts

- be at least 10 lines, typed

- include major symbols or questions from the novel (sphinx, Eloi, Morlocks, machinery, lightness/darkness, etc.); reinforces a theme or themes from the novel (class differences, entropy, civilization on the decline, hope, etc.)

- illustrate poem with a collage, drawing, or graphic

- provide a one paragraph explanation to explain how you chose your passage, assess your success, and identify the required elements

- provide page numbers to identify the passage

- provide a title for your piece or choose a quote from the novel to hold your whole piece together

A Really Quick Example from the Epilogue…

Did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages,

In which men are still men,

With the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved?

In the manhood of race: for I, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment,

Fragmentary theory, mutual discord

Are indeed man’s culminating time!

Machine was made—

The Advancement of Mankind.

The growing pile of civilization

Must inevitably fall and destroy in the end.

The future is still black and blank –

Is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places.

Two strange flowers—shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle—

Witness that even when the mind and strength had gone,

Gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on

In the heart of man. (105-106)