From Georgia Heard's Introduction to THE ARROW FINDS ITS MARK: "I believe that creating a found poem has to do with sharpening a poet's vision--seeing that poetry exists all around us and ultimately having the insight and imagination to find it."


YES!!!

This is the book I have been looking for. Having heard of Georgia (giggle) and her approach to poetry called "Found Poetry," we have been inviting students to use this approach to generate pieces for the past eight years. We'd often use a passage from SPEAK or THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD (one year, I drafted a piece using all four acts of THE CRUCIBLE).

Now, here is a collection from Georgia Heard and some of the biggest names in poetry for students (and for the rest of us). Look at this line-up:

Lee Bennett Hopkins
Marilyn Singer
Joyce Sidman
George Ella Lyon (whose piece comes from a send home memo from her child's school)
Jane Yolen
Naomi Shihab Nye
Rebecca Kai Dotlich (whose piece shows us to poetic nature of text)
Sara Holbrook
Laura Purdie Salas
J. Patrick Lewis (whose piece captures birdcall and renders it as a song)
Janet Wong
Bob Raczka (whose piece is found in pull down menus on a computer screen)
Paul Janeczko (who actually finds a poem within WALDEN)

There's so much to say about a book like this that serves as a companion piece to the approach offered by Georgia some time ago. How many teachers are out there using this approach within their learning community. I remember one year--much to the chagrin of our media specialist--that our Room 210 Readers built book stacks about the library to create a sense of found poetry. I've been captivated by "found" poetry and "strike-out" poetry. Here are two super examples of "strike-out" poetry:

RADI OS by Ronald Johnson:

This is actually a 1977 strike out of Milton's PARADISE LOST which creates a most unique vision of society as Johnson saw it during this creative time. The strike outs are on the page so that the reader truly gets a sense of what has been stricken out and what remains in its stead now.

A HUMUMENT by Tom Phillips:

This is actually an artistic treatment of a medieval text which each page becoming a work of art.

TREE OF CODES by Jonathan Safran Foer:

A re-working of the author's favorite book, STREET OF CROCODILES, this book takes "found poetry" to a whole new level with each page die cut to reveal new letters, words, and arrangements.

NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT by Austin Kleon:

I really like this one for the classroom. Kleon takes sections of the daily paper and blacks out the words he doesn't want to use for a piece leaving words in order or little specks of white that serve to point the reader in the direction Kleon intends the reader to take when reading.


Georgia Heard's new collection is a thin volume packed with poets that should be on classroom reading lists.

I've often likened found poems to be like those bug collections we used to have to do as kids. Get a corkboard; find a bug. Stick a pin through the bug into the corkboard. Label the bug. Submit. So, at the end of the project, we have this evidence of what was once alive, now neatly arranged and labeled like a portable cemetery.

But with found poems, we find words on the wing. We go out with our nets and we look for words. And when we find them, we stick a pen through them into a page. And what we have now is still as wonderfully alive as it was on the back of a cereal box, or a travel guide, or as part of a song coming from the trees.

What I like about Georgia Heard's collection is the number of pieces that seem to come from nature or end up being nature-inspired. I think there is something to this.

It is natural to find poetry.

Come along.

Bring your net.

And a pen.