This prompt is related to those Poetry Magnet Kits you sometimes see in the bookstores, only this is much cheaper.
What I do is read prose, and keep a notebook near by.
As I come a cross a word or phrase that I like, I jot it down.
In the beginning I didn't record where the borrowed lines came from, but now I do.
It seems sort of neat to know which books inspired which poem.
I try to borrow from two or three different books at a time.
I want the work to be mine even if the words are not.
I don't borrow words or phrases from other poems, only from prose, however, if you wish to, you could risk adding one line from some other poetic work.
What I create is, I hope, unrelated to what the poem was borrowed from.
It is a new work made by arranging and rearranging the snippets of interesting words that struck my fancy.
What I have found is that the words and phrases that tend to stand out while I am reading also relate to what is happening in my life.
In this way, these snippets end up creating poetry that does reflect my emotional state, and the thoughts and circumstances of my life.
I remember watching a MASH television show where someone asked Hawkeye what book he would take with him if was going to be stranded on a deserted island.
Hawkeye explained that he would bring a dictionary with him, because, he figured all the books of the world were contained inside of a dictionary.
It's true.
In a sense, a ransom poem is an exercise, and at times a work of art that make use of recycled words and phrases.
Recycling is very topical right now.
Note the following poem is actually made up of snits of words and phrases lifted from the pose that proceeds it.
I put a little box around the cross.
I will now attempt to remember what caught my interest, I arrange and rearrange my own marked words.
I try to contain, inside of me, this snippet of hope, stranded, sort of, by my own.
words and phrases.
I want.
I want.
I want.
This is, in a sense, what I try to do.
It's true.
Sometimes.
It's not a great poem, but it also is not much like the prose from which it was taken.
This activity turns reading into a form of creative writing.
You pay attention more to the shades of meaning in the words you read.
You will make connections that will shake your imagination, jerking loose idea after idea like globes of fruit from the tree of life.
Here is another example followed by the books from which my snippets were lifted.
God runs the world with his hands in his pockets.
You can't deny that.
The will of God is, for me, a mystery without clues.
I did not lose interest, and I did not then abandon my search for truth.
It was those long thick fingers of discouragement that choked the quest out of me, that suffocated my fragile faith.
Most of what I know as truth is actually something called SWAG- (a Scientific Wild-Ass Guess).
I wasn't good at science.
I have a flair for hyperbole makes me pretty sure you know, and I know, exactly what the problem is.
We can't escape the truth, and yet we can't see the truth, or know the truth, or comprehend the truth, or explain the truth, and that's the truth.