Found poem — in a Swedish grammar book I kept in my office at at SCI-Benedictine

Editor’s note — another workshop poem I wrote when I was teaching creative writing at Springfield College in Illinois, which later merged with Benedictine University and was subsequently closed. According to the Academy of American Poets, found poems “take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.” This text I found in the English translation of a table of examples of suffixes indicating different cases (subject, object, etc.) in formal Swedish. The sentences were purely random, but reading them together at the same time, I thought they echoed the absurdity of life. It was published that year in The Sleepy Weasel, our campus literary magazine.