Found Poetry
POETS.ORG
Definition
from poets.org
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.
A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.
Examples of Found Poetry
Twitter (found poem)
The following poem is made up of random Tweets
mostly sad
elaborate schemes and elaborate lies
trapped in an open space, illusion of my own
i will save myself
there is somewhere i'd rather be
i'm such a positive person, oh wait
i need a new perspective,
i was never meant to stay in your phone
who wants to donate to me for the sake that i am pathetic?
i'm grappling with the fact that in a way, i'm kind of innocent
i have gotten so bad recently to the point that whenever i go out,
i think everyone is judging me on my face, my hair, my body, my clothes
terribly good and terribly bad are both equally terrible
To Kill a Mockingbird Found Poem
The author's comments:
This poem is called a found poem. Its when you take phrases from an article or a book and put them together to create a poem. Mine is for "To Kill a Mockingbird".
This is a truth
that applies to the human race,
yet to no particular race of men:
You never really understand a person,
until you consider things from his point of view,
climb inside of his skin,
and walk around in it.
One thing that doesn't abide,
by majority rule;
a person's conscience.
It was times like these
When;
you rarely win,
only children weep,
the dead bury the dead,
one does not love breathing,
and there’s just one kind of folks:
folks.
I don't pretend to understand,
Why reasonable people,
go stark raving mad,
simply because they're still human;
that the one place,
where a man ought to get a square deal,
is in a courtroom,
be he any color of the rainbow.
It was times like these,
That,
food comes with death,
flowers with sickness,
and little things in between;
two soap dolls,
a broken watch and chain,
a pair of good-luck pennies,
and our lives.
It made me sad.
Yet delete the adjectives,
and I'd have the facts;
it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
This is a found poem that I wrote for a class project. It’s based on the autobiography of Richard Wright.
Famous Found Poetry
Found poems can be seen in the work of Blaise Cendrars, David Antin, and Charles Reznikoff.
Charles Reznikoff's "Testimony"
In his book Testimony, Reznikoff created poetry from law reports, such as this excerpt:
Amelia was just fourteen and out of the orphan asylum; at her
first job--in the bindery, and yes sir, yes ma'am, oh, so
anxious to please.
She stood at the table, her blond hair hanging about her
shoulders, "knocking up" for Mary and Sadie, the stichers
("knocking up" is counting books and stacking them in piles to
be taken away).
Many poets have also chosen to incorporate snippets of found texts into larger poems, most significantly Ezra Pound. His Cantos includes letters written by presidents and popes, as well as an array of official documents from governments and banks. The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliott, uses many different texts, including Wagnerian opera, Shakespearian theater, and Greek mythology. Other poets who combined found elements with their poetry are William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Louis Zukofsky.
The found poem achieved prominence in the twentieth-century, sharing many traits with Pop Art, such as Andy Warhol's soup cans or Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheels and urinals. The writer Annie Dillard has said that turning a text into a poem doubles that poem's context. "The original meaning remains intact," she writes, "but now it swings between two poles."
Examples of Found Poems
by Kenneth Goldsmith
by Howard Nemerov
by Kate Durbin
by Vanessa Place
by Robert Fitterman
Newspaper Blackout (Austin Kleon)
More recently, Austin Kleon has taken found poetry to a new level. In his book, "Newspaper Blackout", Austin uses pages from The New York Times to create poetry. Taking a sculptures approach to creating his poems, he starts with a newspaper article, then, with a black marker, he blacks out the words he doesn't need. What's left, are his poems.
Blackout Poems By Austin Kleon
