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Found Poetry

Imagine this...
You just finished listening to a collection of your favorite songs--maybe an album, a movie or musical soundtrack, or a random playlist selected for you by Pandora or Spotify...
 
Don't you wish you could make something wonderful out of that collection? Something created especially by you?
You were just browsing Pinterest, reading through some of the inspirational quotes that you've "pinned" to a Favorite Board... 
 
Don't you wish you could make something wonderful out of that collection? Something created especially by you?
You just finished watching a handful of the Marvel's Comics movies. You memorized all of your favorite lines, of course!
No one knows them better than you...
 
Don't you wish you could make something wonderful out of that collection? Something created especially by you?
Well you can!

Found poems are composed by authors who collect parts from other texts, arrange or rearrange the parts, and assemble a new poem out of them.

 

As can be suggested from the prompts above, found poems are especially favored with producing compositions formed from texts in popular culture including song lyrics, poetry, prose, television or film segments, comic strips, and pictures. Think of it as a literary collage comprised of existing texts.

Consider the way music artists create "mashups" with various songs--this is the musical version of found poems. You too, can song lyrics and create found poems out of them.

 

But remember...

 

Just like those artists must give credit to the original song writers when using lyrics that are not his or her own, you too must give proper citation to each of the writers that contribute to the text of your found poem.

 

If the writing is not your own, you may not claim it.

Samples

Try it!

Choose a theme.

Now think of 4 of your favorite songs to combine into a new arrangment.

Song Mashups

and

Found Poems

Now do the same thing with a few chapters from your favorite book! The process is the same.

This short tutorial video provides an example using only 1 or 2 pages from a book. However, Found poems may be created from a much larger text set if desired.

This is an example of a poem adopted from The Great Gatsby that is actually created using something called Blackout Poetry, but it can still be considered a Found poem because it is created from a different text.

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