Found Poetry

I did a lesson with my juniors this week that turned out quite fun. I introduced them to "found poetry" which is taking existing texts and refashioning them and presenting them as poems. It's the literary equivalent of a collage, and can be made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.

To give my students examples, I made two found poems of my own. The first one is taken from page 111 of The Catcher in the Rye. All I did was pull out phrases, and voila!

The Catcher in the Rye – page 111

Oh, Romeo and Juliet
I liked it a lot
I didn’t like it
It was quite moving on the whole.

I never liked Romeo too much
It was Romeo’s fault
It drives me crazy if somebody gets killed
And it’s somebody’s fault.

Romeo and Juliet
At least it was their own fault.

I then tried to use a more random text and opened up to page 95 of my Hawaii tour book. Here's what I ended up with:

Frommer’s Hawaii 2008 – page 95

Hawaiian kahuna
North Shore
Windward side
White-sand beaches
Across the barren blue of the Pacific.

Beyond Waikiki
Polynesian heritage
Slack-key guitar
Big blue sky
Snorkel in a crystal clear lagoon.

Once you have that, the rest is easy.

Isn't that fun? (Yes, English nerd, I hear you say.) My students were really surprised with the cool poems they came up with. I thought they did a great job!

Try it yourself. Grab a book, magazine, newspaper and pull phrases out of it. You are a poet and don't know it!