Found Poetry/Annie Dillard

Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.

A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.               -definition from poets.org

Here is an example of Found Poetry. Here the poet uses the text from Friedrich Nietzsche's The Leech and selects specific words to craft a poem of his/her own meaning. Since the poem features words from Nietzsche's original text, it captures the similar mood to that work. But the poem also offeres it's own meaning.

As writer Annie Dillard states about found poetry on the website, Found Poetry Review, “Happy poets who write found poetry go pawing through popular culture like sculptors on trash heaps. They hold and wave aloft usable artifacts and fragments: jingles and ad copy, menus and broadcasts — all objet trouvés, the literary equivalents of Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and Duchamp’s bicycle. 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. The poet adds, or at any rate increases, the element of delight. This is an urban, youthful, ironic, cruising kind of poetry. It serves up whole texts, or interrupted fragments of texts.” — Annie Dillard

A pretty amazing poem, wouldn't you say! (Also makes me think of Chillingworth!!)

Check out found poems by Annie Dillard in her book, Mornings Like This. Then try to write a found poem yourself. If you do write one, please share it with us here!