What Is Found Poetry? And What Isn’t?
As a practitioner of found poetry, I’m often tagged into Facebook threads and other Internet discussions on the subject. What is found poetry? And what isn’t? And how do I make a proper found poem?
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I’ve been saying forever that I should write a blog post on this. But, looking at the questions above, there’s a lot of this to cover. So I’m going to try and break it down for y’all.
There are a lot of different styles of found poetry, the basics being erasure (or blackout poetry), cento, and cut-up (or remix). I won’t bore you with a lesson on each of those today, since you can pretty much get the deets from Wikipedia.
A common misconception is that found poetry is a literal poem you found. During my time as an editor at Found Poetry Review, I sometimes saw writers send in a poem written by someone else that they found in a book or magazine, and sent it in. Just a poem. Someone else’s in full. That’s not what constitutes a found poem. That’s just literally finding someone else’s work. Which is fun, you can definitely enjoy it, but it’s not what practitioners of found poetry are talking about when they say they write or make found poems. And it’s certainly not something you can attribute to yourself or publish without permission from the author.
Another common misconception is that a found poem is, to paraphrase comments I’ve seen running around Facebook discussions, “just something you found out in the world that seems poetic.” Like a street sign, the back of a cereal box, or a description on a menu. While you can totally use street signs and menus to create found poetry, you have to intervene on the text in order for it to be a found poem. Something YOU wrote. A found poem requires engagement with the original text—or source text—by the author. So, if you took a bunch of street signs and cobbled them together into something new, yes, you’d have a found poem. Or you could create an erasure or cut-up from text on a menu. It’s not necessarily easy to make a found poem this way, but it can be done!
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The next faux pas is something I have commonly seen while reading for quite a few journals where I’ve come across submissions of found poetry. And this is taking a source text—anything from a paragraph from a novel, promotional copy from the back of a DVD, a magazine article—and simply adding linebreaks. While it certainly does require some engagement and intervention on the part of the poet to linebreak a text, the text remains ultimately the same as when the poet first encountered it. A good found poem strategically erases, rearranges, or otherwise changes the source text into something completely new.
Which brings me to the number one pitfall of the found poetry practitioner: Summarizing. When you engage a source text to write a found poem, it’s important to write something that doesn’t reflect the tone or content of the source (with some exceptions, which I’ll point out down page). For example, if you’re using a movie review in the newspaper for your source, your new found poem shouldn’t merely summarize the movie review (or the movie). It should say something completely new, and in your voice as a poet. You could use the article, for example, to write a love poem, or to write about a rough experience that you had. This is one of the great beauties of found poetry, in my experience—finding a new story inside a story that already exists.
It can take a lot of practice to find your voice in found poetry, so don’t be afraid to make mistakes, just like any other type of writing. You may find that your found poetry voice is the same as your traditional poetry voice. You may find that it’s different. But it should still be yours. The key is that you intervene on the text and create something new and different from the narrative of the original.
There can be exceptions to this. And I think that one of the places you’ll find this is in political found poetry, and this can be tricky. One of the greatest things about found poetry is that you can use it to subvert or even respond to a source text that you find problematic or disturbing. So say you have an op ed about how women should be in the kitchen making sandwiches all day long. You could write a found poem subverting this, using the language from the original text to present a poem that gives your opposing opinion. You can see how being this close to the original source could be hard in terms of intervention on the text, but the key here is using your voice to say something new in terms of style and opinion but similar in language and topic.
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I’m not an expert in fair use, and there are lots of better resources on best practices for fair use of poetry, but I will say this: The above example is one of the most difficult to pull off. But if you’re following the above ideas and guidelines, you should be able to practice—and publish!—found poetry without any concern about fair use or copyright issues. It’s like parody in the sense that you are altering the original content enough for it to be an original piece of art. Using one, two, or even more source texts, so long as you are creating a new narrative, writing an original piece, and not using too much (and “too much” is going to be subjective in a lot of cases—I may write more on fair use in the future), you’re in the clear.
Regarding permissions, no, you don’t need permission from the author of the source text to write or publish found poetry using their text so long as you are within the bounds of fair use. It falls under the same types of laws and restrictions as parody or collage. However, it’s worth noting that found poetry can become problematic if the author is, say, a white man using texts written by a woman of color to create erasures that discuss race. This would probably be appropriative and thoughtless. You want to be just as mindful and meticulous as you would be writing any poem, if not more so. Being conscientious about what type of source text you’re using and why can be a big part of crafting found poetry.
So go forth and make found poems! Some of my favorite source texts are horror novels, YA mysteries, women’s magazines, and the science section of the newspaper. I know poets who have written cool stuff using descriptions of food products, Harlequin romances, political commentary, comic books, other poets’ poems, and TV shows. But a good practitioner of found poetry can make a poem from almost anything. I aspire to be that poet.
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