There was a time in my life where I went a little nuts about found poetry. A “gotcha” feeling lurks under the staircase of every found poem, in that someone was able to claim a poem without ever having to think of their own words. The Academy of American Poets defines found poems as those that “take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage…” They quench a creative thirst, and simultaneously satisfy the tinkerer’s urge to deconstruct and put back together. It’s poetry-making for tricksters. (And nerds, because who else thinks poetry is fun?)

This New Year’s Eve, I asked my dinner guests to help me improvise a group found poem. Each guest was asked to capture the year behind them, and the year to come, with a sentence on two sides of an index card. The idea was to jumble the cards around and read them aloud, in anonymous succession, at the stroke of New York midnight (because hey, we have little kids). Among our hodgepodge of folding tables and chairs, we had our own collage of friends who we had known for twenty years, a few dear-friends-of-dear-friends who we had just met, and every sweet connection in between.

A word to those who might consider thrusting a poetry assignment upon a room of friends who happen to also be contractors, salespeople, and chefs: go easy on them. A few folks took to the task like they’d been waiting all night for a pen and paper. Others reluctantly humored me for the sake of being good sports. Most everyone else was just peer pressured. In the waning hours of 2018, our late night scribbles ranged from darling (“2018 was the year that I went to kindergarten”) to vaguely spiritual, to dark humor (“It was the year I didn’t kill my kid!”). They also included a few candid confessions of sanity nearly lost and gone forever. Who would have guessed, in a noisy room filled with so many smiles and belly laughs, that some of us defined this as the year that we had been white knuckle gripping our last shreds of calm? You never know until you ask.

I’ve never been one for organized adult party games. But as far as fun-and-creativity-by-force goes, my found poem idea kinda worked out great. Our party dipped as deeply into joy as a simple dinner with friends can reach. My friends and I, full on wine and cheese and our own delight, swapped seats a half dozen times to get in on one another’s jokes and to make sure we got the stories right. Meanwhile, the children buzzed in and out of rooms, methodically and happily leaving behind small explosions of toys. It was that kind of perfect gathering.

When my friend and I recited the group’s found poem that night, it elicited boisterous applause and a few wet cheeks. My nifty literary souvenir, however, was not the moon. It was the finger pointing to the moon. The real poem lay in the thunderous laughter at one end of the table. It brewed in the three women leaning in close to make sure they heard every word. It spilled over out of mismatched wine glasses and bring-your-own cheese plates. And the shrieks of children running at full sprint through the living room were the meter even if there was no rhyme. The first line began long before New York midnight and the last letter was made hours later. I’m a sucker for found poems’ trickster persona, but this New Year’s Eve, the trick was on me: I had this wacky idea to create a found poem from index cards. The real poem in the room, however, was in the gathering of so many cherished friends.

Robert Louis Stevenson famously described Napa’s wine as “bottled poetry” when he honeymooned here in the 1880s. Wine lends itself to flowery interpretation, and like a good poem, it can leave its consumer giddy with bliss. Sometimes, though, the most resonating art comes from the people gathered around the bottle. That’s where the real poetry is found.