Find Found Poetry

Exercise Your InkTank
Writing without Composing

If you’ve never heard of found poetry, you’re about to because:
1. It’s everywhere
2. Everybody’s doing it, whether they intent to or not (see Donald Rumsfeld)
3. It’s a good way to see language as language
4. Its critique of the way we use language is implicit (built-in)
5. Its critique of the culture in which the original text was created is implicit
6. You’ve decided to attend the Salon and there’s no escaping it now

The rules are very simple: using ordinary texts from the world around you, create a poem. Do not write. Compose. You may subtract lines of text and re-arrange them, but you may not add any words or phrases of your own. Your poem need not follow any formal structure (although it can, if you like) but pay close attention to what line breaks can do to the meaning and rhythm of your lines. A line as simple as the one I am writing now, can begin to look like a poem quite easily:

A line as simple
As the one I am
Writing now can
Begin to look like a poem
Quite easily.

Below you’ll find a few examples of famous (notorious) found poems. A simple Google search will provide you with a few thousand or million more. We’ll draw our original texts from a hat. Should no hats prove present or available to us, original texts will be drawn in some other equally exciting and totally random fashion. Feel free to write on your original text (maybe crossing out or highlighting words or phrases) and then transfer your found poem to the back of this sheet. Try to compose (not write) at least five lines. We’ll share them and then the best (to be determined by wild hooting and hollering) will be published on the blog.

THE UNKNOWN
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002,
Department of Defense news briefing


A CHALLENGE TO YOUR SPIRIT
Girls and boys of America
Are the hope of the world!
You can’t evade it, young America.
And are you going to go on dancing
And spinning on your ear?
What are you thinking about, sitting
There staring into the dark?
Haven’t you been lying around long
Enough?
Shouldn’t you go to work?
Find as interesting a subject as possible.
Write as vivid a sketch as you can
Of a person who attracts you or an animal.

Annie Dillard from “Junior High English” from Mornings Like This: Found Poems