What is Found Poetry? Prompts and Inspiration

Found poetry is proof that a poem can be discovered in any instance of language. But there’s an art and craft to the making of found poetry that, like any other poetry form, requires patience and creativity to do it well.

Simply put, found poetry is the generation of poetry through the use of other texts. Rather than beginning with a blank page, the found poet works with existing texts to create new and interesting relationships within language. It is a different way of playing with words—and can yield some really fun surprises for the tinkering poet.

There are a few different types of found poetry, so let’s explore the hidden art of stealing and repurposing language.

What is Found Poetry?: Three Definitions

Found poetry is any form of poetry that is made from arranging or manipulating existing texts and turning them into a poem. There are three primary forms of found poetry, each of which demand their own processes and considerations.

Found poetry is any form of poetry that is made from arranging or manipulating existing texts and turning them into a poem.

Found Poetry

Any form of poetry created by arranging and manipulating “found texts.” A cento sits on the extreme end of found poetry, in that centos can only use lines from other poems. But you can make a found poetry out of anything: emails, billboards, newspapers, brochures, ingredients lists, the terms and conditions of your lease or cellphone, etc.

Blackout or Erasure Poetry

A poem created by erasing or blacking out the text of a source text. These poems are often in conversation with the source text.

For example, an anonymous poet once blacked out the front page of the New York Times headline announcing the stock market crash; it read “Because I could not stop for debt, he kindly stopped for me.” (A misquote of Emily Dickinson.)

You can learn more about blackout poetry at our article here:

https://writers.com/what-is-blackout-poetry-examples-and-inspiration

Cento Poem

A cento is a poem that only uses lines from other sources. Cento comes from a Greek word for “patchwork garment”, so centos are like patchwork poems, in which a new text forms from the texts stitched together.

Why Write Found Poetry?

Why would you write a found poem, instead of writing a poem with your own voice?

Indeed, while found poetry relies on other texts, the poet’s own voice and mind emerge from how they curate and arrange those texts.

Found poems, blackout poems, and centos can:

• Put different writers or texts in conversation with one another.
• Cut against the grain of source texts to reveal something new or interesting in those texts.
• Reveal hidden relationships between ideas and poets/writers.

Indeed, while found poetry relies on other texts, the poet’s own voice and mind emerge from how they curate and arrange those texts.

In all of these examples, the mind of the poet is revealed not in the words they use, but in the words they find and arrange. It is poetry by curation—a means of discovering what otherwise might have gone unsaid in the juxtaposition of words themselves.

Found Poetry Examples

The following examples of found poetry demonstrate different ways of collaging and curating texts. All examples come from contemporary poetry.

Found Poem: “Ritual against toxic masculinity” by Kenji C. Liu

Retrieved from Arc Poetry.

This poem comes from Liu’s book Monsters I Have Been, a collection of “frankenpo” poems. Frankenpo, a form invented by Liu, is a sort of “Frankensteins poem”—a poem whose various parts and organs are composed of disparate texts stitched into one another. Liu arranges these texts to cut against the grains of each other, revealing hidden meanings and ideas and creating a narrative through their arrangement.

This particular poem is a frankenpo of the screenplay of Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) + Confusian Analects 1.1 (475 BC-221 BC) + Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). It might be hard to read and understand, as the texts feel fragmented when arranged the way they are. That said, the title is a doorway into understanding the poem, as are the texts this poem pulls from: through image and metaphor, the poem offers a way of understanding and defining toxic masculinity, and what it takes for men to resist it.

Read this found poem a few times, paying close attention to the poem’s form, time stamps, and juxtapositions. And don’t worry if you don’t “get it”—some poems are better felt than intellected.

Erasure Poem: “6 Erasures of Yelp Reviews of the Taco Bell on Santa Rosa Street in San Luis Obispo, CA” by Caleb Nichols

Retrieved here.

Don’t get me wrong—the source material is absurd, ironic, Postmodern, etc. But that’s part of the point: Nichols here discovers both wisdom and wit in these taco bell reviews.

If you pay close attention, you can see how these erasures are repurposing the source material: “order” likely refers to ordering food, “dinning” may have been a misspell of “dining,” and “shredded pieces” is almost certainly referring to lettuce or cheese. So to take these reviews and discover insights like “you want like you need” or “this is honesty: order order order ruin”—that’s nothing short of genius.

Cento Poem: Cento Between the Ending and the End by Cameron Awkward Rich

Retrieved here.

Here’s a note from the poet on the composition of this cento:

“‘Cento Between the Ending and the End’ is composed of language scavenged from the works of Justin Phillip Reed, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Fatimah Asghar, Kaveh Akbar, sam sax, Ari Banias, C. Bain, Oliver Bendorf, Hanif Abdurraqib, Safia Elhillo, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Franny Choi, Lucille Clifton, and Nate Marshall. All of whom have made for me a world and for whom I wish the world.”

Prompts for Writing Found Poetry

Write a poem that engages with and manipulates sources texts to create a wholly new text.

Cento poems, blackout poems, and found poetry are three ways of doing this. If you find yourself drawn to a new way of creating poetry, follow that instinct.

Ideas for tackling the prompt

Here are some doorways into the creation of your poem. If none of these work for you, again, follow and trust your own poetic instincts.

1. Who are some poets whose work you find to be similar? This could be aesthetically, formally, ideologically, etc. Write a cento that amplifies the ideas and images that are present across those similar poems.
2. What is a poet or poem that you disagree with? Write a poem that engages with that text to subvert or respond to the poem’s argument. You could do this in a cento, or write a found or blackout poem that creates a poem ideologically opposite to its source text.
3. What are some source texts you have strong feelings about? Maybe you really hate celebrity worship in People Magazine. Or maybe you really love the way that spam emails sound. Put those source texts in conversation with or inside of poetry, and do this in a way that amplifies your feelings about the source text. So, if you love spam, you could create a spam mail poem just by scrolling through your inbox.
4. Go through the poetry archives of your local library, and just read through random books. Find lines you like or hate, poems you agree with or don’t understand—anything that evokes emotions, even emotions you can’t name. Collect these lines and poems. When you have enough of them, think laterally: what connects all of this found language? Write a cento or found poem that makes those connections.
5. Take one poem that you have strong feelings about. Write a poem that uses every single word in the original poem, and only that poem’s words, but creates an entirely new poem by shuffling those words around.

More Poetry Writing Resources

If you’re interested more broadly in the craft of poetry, here are some resources for you:

• How to write a poem
• What is form in poetry?
• What is poetry?
• Becoming a poet

Write Found Poetry at Writers.com

Whether you want to write poetry in your own voice or stitch it from the voices of others, you’ll get exposed to great poetry and feedback at Writers.com. Take a look at our upcoming poetry writing classes, where you’ll receive expert advice on every poem you write.