Hidden Poetry: The Workings of a Found Poem

Welcome to another installment of Form Friday, also known as one of my favorite themed posts of the month. Today, we're talking about one of my favorite forms of poetry: found poetry.

Found poetry is as simple as it sounds: you select some text, whether it be a newspaper article, a nonfiction essay,scribblings in a phone booth, or anything else that interests you, and you take the pieces you like, rearranging them into something new and incredibly poetic. Think of the found poem as the poetry equivalent of a collage.

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Finding scraps of sentences counts as a form of poetry? You bet it does.

In my brain, found poetry and blackout poetry are very similar; each deals in picking words and phrases out of a piece of text and creating something new. The biggest difference between the two is that with blackout poetry, your poem is restricted to the structure of the text from which is comes. With found poetry, you have the freedom to rearrange as much as you want.

Now, a true found poem doesn't stray from the text you took it from, which can be both a worthwhile challenge and a hindrance. Because you're not required to keep the phrases you pick in order, like you are with blackout poetry, you do have a lot of flexibility when it comes to writing found poems. You can doctor up two phrases and blend them into one. You can use the concluding sentence at the start of the poem. You can do absolutely whatever you want with the text you choose to use to write your found poem.

This isn't to say that you have to only use the words or phrases you pluck out of a piece of text. There are plenty of poets out there (myself included) that have incorporated phrases they've found into their poems, but have not constructed their poem entirely from found words and phrases. (T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, just to name a few.) Ultimately, it's your choice to use what inspires you most.

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Annie Dillard has a fantastic quote about found poetry to convince you to give it a go:

“Happy poets who write found poetry go pawing through popular culture like sculptors on trash heaps. [...] By entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles. The poet adds, or at any rate increases, the element of delight. This is an urban, youthful, ironic, cruising kind of poetry.”

If you're like me, you might be panicking, quieting cries of "plagiarism!" in your mind. Thankfully, The Found Poetry Review outlines some great tips on how to write found poetry fairly. What I do, when I create a found poem, is to give credit to the original source right under the byline. Here's an example:

Well, I've prattled on for long enough; now it's your turn! Time for the writing prompt (or perhaps, the cut-and-paste prompt, depending on whether you add your own words to your poem):

1. Pick a source that interests you. This can be newspaper articles, books, advertisements, or just about anything you want. FOUND magazine is a favorite of mine, when I want to create found poems from new sources.

2. Read briefly through your source and circle the words and phrases that jump out to you initially. You aren't bound to those words or phrases, but those were your "sparkly spots" for a reason, so you might want to listen to your intuition.

3. Begin constructing your found poem. (PSST: Verbatim Poetry has tons of excellent examples of found poetry, in case you feel weary trudging into a new form of poetry and want to see what others have done.)

4. Edit your poem to your heart's content, adding or taking away snippets as you choose. Once you get going, you can decide whether you want to add your own words or keep your poem a true, pure found poem.

5. Pat yourself on the back, because now you're a master poetry collage artist.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Let's talk about found poetry; leave us a comment below! WHAT IF we got really meta and made a found poem out of comments? What a world that would be.