This piece was originally published on Medium!
Found poetry is one of my favourite activities to do with the young people I work with. It never fails to inspire even the most reluctant writers and it will usually lure in the children who are adamant that they hate poetry. Because I’ve spent a lot of time researching it, experimenting with it and preparing classes with it, it has quickly become my favourite type of poetry too.
There are a lot of reasons for this and there are many different types of found poetry. I will get to both these points in just a minute.
But for now, let’s quickly dive into what it is about poetry that puts people off in the first place. I can only approach this analysis from a personal point of view and from the things poetry-wary children and teenagers have told me over the years.
For me, and often for the youngsters I work with, poetry is something that is forced on them. I work with school children and home-educated children, most of whom also study poetry for English Literature and Language classes. It differs a lot — overall, the home-ed kids have a lot more say in their curriculum but often still have an aversion to poetry, whereas the school children have no choice in what they are taught. For this reason, poetry is forced upon them. They might grow to like it or even love it, but they don’t have a choice in studying it.
This in itself is often enough to put them off. I often encounter children in my sessions who just want to write what they want to write and don’t appreciate being dragged from their amazing story idea to focus on poetry they don’t care about. They are defensive already; their backs are up.
Also, some of the poetry inflicted on school children in particular is, lets be honest, hard to swallow. It’s been a long time since I was at school but I clearly recall studying poems that meant nothing to me and had no impact on me. In short, I could not relate to them. I often found them too long, too boring, too flowery and wordy. I was put off. If the words themselves had to be translated for me to understand, I was put off even more.
This isn’t the case for everyone and of course, there are some beautiful, in fact stunning, poems out there that deserve to be studied for centuries to come.
And this leads us to the second problem. Poetry can be intimidating.
We read things like Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas, The Waste Land by T.S Eliot and She Walks In Beauty by Lord Byron, and we are in awe, instantly feeling we can’t compete, nor should we ever try. Poetry can be beautiful, engaging and life-affirming. Like all writing, poetry can change the world. It can certainly change your life.
When I ask young people why they don’t like poetry they usually give the same reasons I used to for not liking poetry:
It’s boring.
It’s inaccessible.
It’s intimidating.
It’s not relatable.
It’s hard. (This is the complaint I hear the most from poetry-averse kids!)
It’s too complicated/wordy/long…
The first time I really fell in love with poetry and felt like I could actually write it too was when I discovered Charles Bukowski. I had already read and loved some of his books so it seemed a natural step to check out his poetry and I was blown away. So much so that I have lines from two of his poems tattooed on my arms.
Reading Bukowski made me want to write poems — finally! Reading Bukowski made me feel like I could. Like poetry was for me too.
It was so freeing. Why? Because he didn’t care what anyone thought, he didn’t try to impress anyone, he didn’t even try to impress himself. He didn’t follow rules, he just wrote from the heart. That is my favourite kind of poetry and I’m always ecstatic when I discover pieces like that.
But let’s get back to found poetry and why it works so well for reluctant poets like me and the kids I work with.
Here are a few of the forms and briefly how to do them:
Blackout poetry — you find some old newspapers, magazines, unwanted books, posters, leaflets — anything you can get your hands on. You get a big fat marker pen and start eliminating words. You look for words lost and stranded between the chunks of black you are creating.
Magnetic poetry — a really fun form of found poetry. There are various themed sets you can buy online. I currently have a nature themed one and a horror/gothic themed one. They come in cute little boxes and kids can spread them out and see what words draw their eye. They can make list poems, haikus, anything they like, and it’s always lovely to see their faces light up when the magnets create something beautiful for them.
Haicubes — I have a set of these but we don’t just use them to create haiku poems, we use them for any type of poetry and sometimes even as writing prompts or story starters. It’s basically a huge set of dice with random words on and a few with themes. Kids can pile them up, line them up or pick random ones to inspire longer sentences.
Found poetry from the environment — there are two ways I approach this in my writing clubs. One, I bring in a bag full of words and phrases I have cut out of magazines, posters, leaflets and newspapers. I cut out anything that catches my eye and it is quite addictive. I like to have as many as possible. Some will be single words. Some will be whole sentences. Some are more like headlines or sub-titles. I spread them out on the desks and let the kids rifle through them. The idea is to pick any words that call out to them and see what that inspires. We have had some fantastic poems made this way.
The other way is to use the environment itself. This is fairly easy in the school building as there are posters and notice boards everywhere! They can wander around with a clipboard and pen, picking up words and phrases and writing them down. They then sit down and try to reorder them into a poem.
Cut-up/fold-up poetry — this is currently my favourite form of found poetry as you will see if you look through my poems on Medium! I discovered fold-up poetry about two years ago when researching ideas for my clubs. The one I came across asks writers to divide a piece of paper into four boxes. You write a list of everything you can see in one box, everything you can hear in another, followed by everything you can smell in the third and then in the last box, everything you can taste. You then try to pick at least two lines from each box, add to them, rework them if you like, and try to arrange the eight lines into a poem. It helps to try and pick out themes; for example, I was recently on a road trip and the weather was atrocious, so lots of my senses boxes had lines about the rain, how it sounded and so on. The poem ended up with a definite theme and I called it Driving Conditions. However, I have to admit that the fold-up technique using the senses can be quite tricky in a classroom or Zoom setting. So, since then, we have been making up our own boxes and breaking the rules.
We choose as many lines as we like, for example. Perhaps you get lines from each box or perhaps one box gets ignored completely; it doesn’t matter. The idea is to pick a strong first line and then see where it takes you.
You can title the boxes with anything you like.
Try writing things you love in box one, in box two write things you hate, in box three write things you fear, and in box four write things you dream of. You can change it up anyway you like!
Personally I always like to have a box with things I can hear in it and love writing these poems on long road trips. Probably because I can see and hear different things than normal on a road trip. The ‘hear’ one is a favourite of mine as we always have music on, and random lines will leap out at me and get written into a box. I try to pick the lines that could be said by anyone, as obviously you have to be aware of plagiarsm or copyright infringement. One of my lines in a recent poem was ‘I’d rather die’ which came from a Lana del Rey song we were playing. I added ‘love hurts’ in front of it and made a new line with a different meaning.
There are so many ways of playing around with found poetry and I think it’s incredibly freeing. You can approach the page with a blank mind and no ideas, because eventually you will find the words and the ideas floating around you.
For young writers who dislike poetry, this is a fantastic mode of persausion. They don’t actually have to come up with the words themselves; they just have to find them. Most of the time, I see this lead to a real increase in confidence with poetry, which is wonderful.
Check out a few of my found poems below and why not give it a try?
Wanderlust – a cut-up poem
excluded from running wild
never our land
check your barriers
and thank you for driving carefully
the road gets tough
mixing petrol fumes with coffee and cream
follow the white lines
across a patchwork land
praying the car won’t die
lights coming towards us
ignite our wanderlust
the sea, behind green hills
mist rolling down the valleys
love hurts, I’d rather die
so I carved out a quiet
little
life
for
myself
The Future Is Coming – a cut-up poem
Why do people ruin everything?
wildfires — no water
rusted, barbed wire coiled like snakes
sharp stones underfoot
but we cleared up the broken glass
falling over, getting splashed
this place is hungry
the current trickles under the fallen log
let’s trespass, let’s explore
what’s that noise?
The future — it’s coming
run
