Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Found Poems

The topic of found poems came up on Jenners blog the other day. She used several definitions from the dictionary to write found poems. Kitten also wrote a found poem. She used one definition from the dictionary for hers.

I remember reading Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones where she also talked about found poems. She told about giving a few pages of her journal to writing students and asked them to create poems using some of her phrases and words. Several students took the challenge. Each poem was different, but she was interested to see that they all included one phrase in common - "The hills of New Mexico are everywhere you go".

I decided to go back through my writing practice notebook, looking for phrases that I could use in a found poem. The phrases were scattered throughout the notebook and I combined them in a way I liked. Here's what I ended up with:

When were you going to tell me?
The days have lost their meaning and rhythm
Color variations, swirled patterns
Pass in front of my eyes
Warming and thinning my mood.
When were you going to tell me?

Here is another one from phrases taken from one page of my journal:

He smelled of
dry cleaned clothes and
aftershave and
his favorite brand of cigarette

A compilation of everything
that's gone before and
everything that's to come after

8 comments:

Summer said...

I think I might take that challenge and try it too... may take me a little while to make time to do it though!!!

Kitten said...

Jenners left me a more detailed explanation of a found poem in a comment she made on my blog. I'm going to re-read it and write some more found poems based on that. It'll be a couple of days, though, as I'm up to my eyeballs in correcting student papers. Ugh. :P

J Cosmo Newbery said...

Memories. I had forgotten what dry-cleaned clothes smelled like.

Jenners said...

Oh these were wonderful! I love the approach you took and how these came out! I am particularly fond of the "dry cleaned clothes" one.

You know, I didn't even know there was a real term for "found" poems. I thought I had just made it up on my own back in the day when I did this originally. I am just loving learning more about this and seeing what everyone is doing.

Melissa B. said...

Found poems are so much fun to write...hey, I think you just gave me an idea for a Writing Challenge "project"!

Jewel Allen said...

I love the details of

*He smelled of
dry cleaned clothes and
aftershave and
his favorite brand of cigarette*

I would love to do more poetry, or to put more poetry into my fiction.

Aunt Julie said...

I love these! I'm posting a Homemade Poem at my place tomorrow...please come over to critique it!

jubilee said...

"Found poetry" is a new term to me. Love it.