Found Poetry Collages by Mary Bast: Writing Found and Headline Poems

Friday, November 17, 2023

Writing Found and Headline Poems

(from Getting the Knack: 20 Poetry Writing Exercises,
by Stephen Dunning and William Stafford; excerpted from pages 3-5)

"A nice thing about 'found' and 'headline' poems: you don't start from scratch... You find interesting, ordinary 'prose'... Plenty of strong and beautiful poems are made from plain language... So, poems hide in things you and others say and write... This exercise is about keeping your ears and eyes alert to the possibilities in ordinary language...

"Find from fifty to one hundred words you like...

"Copy in the sequence in the language you found. Double space between lines so it's easy to work with.

"Study the words you found. Cut out everything unnecessary... Try to cut your original find in half... Change punctuation if you need to... adding your own words to the found words is 'illegal' [but] when you're close to an edited-down version, and you truly need to add a word or two ̶ to smooth things out, to make sense, to make a point ̶ you may add up to two words of your own... Make other little changes, too ̶ tenses, possessives, plurals, punctuation, and capitalizations.

"Read your cut-down draft one more time... Put the words into your notebook, spacing or arranging them so they're poem-like. (Sometimes you'll put key words at the ends or beginnings of lines. Sometimes, for interest or surprise, you may want to break up words that often 'go together').

"At the bottom of the poem, say where you found the original."

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About Me

Former Editor at Bacopa Literary Review, I write poetry, found poetry, and memoir. When my hands aren't on computer keys they're creating art.

The Found Poetry Review's 2015 PoMoSco (Poetry Month Scouts) project especially intrigued me -- the chance to experiment with a variety of found poetry structures.

Those exercises also enhanced my under-standing of poetry and writing in general. For example, the "First in Line" badge required creating a poem from first lines in one poet's collection.

My resulting poem, "The Days Have Done With You" (from Nina Bogin's collection In the North) made me much more aware of the way a poem's first line can either set up what's going to happen or drop us right into action, much the same as the start of a good novel.

Some Forms of Found Poetry

Found poetry is created by taking words or phrases from other sources and changing spacing and lines, adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. Any poetic form can be used with found poetry.

There's also the cento—made up of lines from other poems. The sources may be poems of a single poet, or many poets, or even many different languages.

Erasure poems eliminate everything from a page or pages except the words that make up the poem. The "erasure" may be accomplished by white-out, correction tape (of various colors), lightening a photo and writing the poem's words over the original text, and many other variations.

Called blackout poems when covered with black tape (often refers to newspaper articles blacked out except for the words of the poem).

Ekphrasis usually refers to poetry inspired by visual art; I've extended the term to include art inspired by poetry.

Illustrated poetry describes poems and art side by side.

Haiga traditionally incorporated an ink-brush or watercolor painting, a haiku poem, and calligraphy. Modern poets stretch these boundaries, superimposing haiku on photos, for example.