Last month, I discovered Found Poetry, I guess I could say, I found Found Poetry. It’s always been there and I have seen it before but for the first time in December, I started creating some Found Poetry myself.
It really happened by accident, I was reading a newspaper at work and found a few peculiar words and phrases in an article that I thought was truly poetic, something was there, and it was mysterious and beautiful. I underlined the words and then began inking in everything else around them until I had just the words and finally a poem.
What is Found Poetry?
Found Poetry is a poetic form where words, texts and sentences are sought out or found in everyday spaces and extracted. Used and practically collaged into a new format to create a poem.
For example, for me my Found Poetry has been coming from newspapers. So I’ve been taking local newspapers and highlighting, circling, underlining words and sentences that stand out to me. Then I try to shape the words into one final poem.
I have been pretty bold because I take one article or section of the paper and try to group the words and sentences together on the same page, not cutting out and or gluing the words on a new page. I’ve been trying to mold poems out of what I find in the paper by blacking out everything else. It’s hard to do this but I realized that creating Found Poetry this way pushed me and my skills as a writer
poets.org has a great definition and example of Found Poetry
It is a fun poetic form to try, and I mainly use it now as an exercise to get me in the groove of writing poetry.
After I had a small pile of these Found newspaper Poems I decided to start putting them together in one book. So now I have a few pages filled in a blank notebook full of my found poetry. Some are good but most of them are ok.
You can see on my instagram story highlight my Found Poems, and my Found Poetry Book that I am making.
I want to keep working with Found Poetry and maybe even dabble in creating poems on canvas by using paint and words to create large poems, art on two levels.
This is a fun poetic form and I recommend it to any poets, writers, artists, really anyone who wants to explore so try it today!
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