This site contains links to articles, poems, videos and resources on writing found poems, and keeping your eyes, ears and heart open enough to find them.
You'll also find my own found poetry here (by way of example and illustration) plus a weird and wonderful assortment of creative quirkiness, invitations to the life poetic all, that I've found on the web.
Finding Poetry
What a great poem teaches you, and it’s not intellectual at all, is the resonance in the language that’s heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language. I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing—an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible. If something can’t be said, what do you do? You scream.
Frozen Moment
Frightened, heavy with a strange melancholy.
Each night smaller. Down into - right down to the -
Merely thinking of it could make one cold
So cold
The hole in which - fast in the ice -
They could no longer see.
Then all at once a great flock of autumn.
The sky filled with golden brown
As the sun danced and the clouds hung
Splashed in its splendour.
The leaves floated so lightly on the wind
They were flying so high, so high
Around and around - like a wheel
Spread so lovely
Out flew a cry - so shrill and strange
Shrieked
Took hold of them, away from the cold
Such a strange feeling -
They looked straight ahead
Trying to capture such loveliness
As if stunned,
Back to life.
~~~
From The Ugly Duckling. Found by cutting up the lines of a two page section of the story, and moving the lines around until they formed a shape, then cutting out the words that were no longer needed.
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.
Poetry is song. No one asks, What use is song? What use are birds? Poetry has no use. It matters because of its inutility.
Echo of a Moment
Still remembered death
A vicious affair
Just senselessness, entirely,
An echo,
A brief moment,
Bold and ironical,
Lost to her forever.
~~~
From chapter 1, The Brothers Karamazov
The poet knows that he speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or ‘with the flower of the mind’… not with the intellect alone but with the intellect inebriated with nectar.
![apoetreflects:
“Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his [or her] own.
—Salvatore Quasimodo, from New York Times, 14 May 1960](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lre56x9VtY1qe0r71o1_500.jpg)
“Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his [or her] own.
—Salvatore Quasimodo, from New York Times, 14 May 1960
(via journalofanobody)
