Found poetry

This post puts together bits and pieces about how found poetry can be incorporated in the classroom.
Why?
1. Convenient, accessible way to generate poetry
2. Encourages wordplay, sensitivity to how a text is arranged
3. Brings literature out in the open (guerilla submission method - "found" poetry)

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Classic example:

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold


William Carlos Williams


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Great contemporary example:

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Hart Seely, Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld

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NYT Learning Network always provides teaching wisdom:
Student Challenge: Create a Found Poem from the News
Article on Found & Headline Poems

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Another way of generating poetry, this time using search engines to craft prose poetry paragraphs:

Poegles

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Submission: Put it somewhere, guerilla-style.


Things We Forget


Possible locations
- In a library book
- Under a chair or table
- At the back of the toilet cubicle door (captive audience)
- On the toilet mirror
- On a teacher's desk
- On a refrigerator
Etc

Geography Lesson by Brian Patten

Our teacher told us one day he would leave
And sail across a warm blue sea
To places he had only known from maps,
And all his life had longed to be.

The house he lived in was narrow and grey
But in his mind's eye he could see
Sweet-scented jasmine clinging to the walls,
And green leaves burning on an orange tree.

He spoke of the lands he longed to visit,
Where it was never drab or cold.
I couldn't understand why he never left,
And shook off the school`s stranglehold.

Then halfway through his final term
He took ill and never returned.
He never got to that place on the map
Where the green leaves of the orange trees burned.

The maps were redrawn on the classroom wall;
His name forgotten, he faded away.
But a lesson he never knew he taught
Is with me to this day.

I travel to where the green leaves burn,
To where the ocean's glass-clear and blue,
To places our teacher taught me to love-
And which he never knew.