I have discovered and rapidly become obessed with found poetry. If you aren’t aware of found poetry, it is using words and phrases you find in certain placecs to make a poem. This is how wikipedia describes it:

“Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry (a literaryequivalent of a collage) by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning.”

This whole voyage of discovery came out of a conversation with the lovely Lucy from  PorterGirl about auto correct and predictive text. So for my first venture into found poetry I decided to use only the words suggested by my phone’s predictive text:

I am not sure if it is true or not
I am not sure if I am a good person
Saturday nights are the best things ever

I am not sure if I should be honest with this
Yes I am sure that I am not sure
The idea of the gin is not a bad thing

Yes I thought you had to be honest with me
It does not work for the people who don’t know
Yes yes indeed yes

Which is interesting and not just random word salad so that is a start…

My second attempt went like this:

Yes there was an option for a small gin
Yes It was good fun, there was a lot of good stuff
It should probably have been more sensible than it was

Yes I do have some sort of food
Yes it does seem like that would be quite tricky
It was ok but that was meant for your mind

Well…I see a gin theme developing here, and to be honest the line:
“It should probably have been more sensible than it was”
probably sums up my whole life!

I liked the repetition in the startign words, so I continued this for my third attempt:

I am just leaving work for a while
I am just so happy to see it again
If it doesn’t happen again it should

I am just not surprised at all
I am not going on anything else
If you had been a little more sensible then she would have been a better person

I could see by this point that my predicitive text with no direction was startign to come up with the same words, so I decided to see what it would do if I gave it some help…

So I gave it the letter M…literally that is all…

Manipulation is not very much fun
It hurts me to think about it but you never know what I mean
It was a very small thing but it certainly was meant to be hurtful
It does nothing for me and my mind

Well…me and my mind are not sure about that one…

I quite like it though!

I also quite like this form of poetry, and am inspired to try some more found poetry method. I have seen examples made from words taken from book pages or magazine pages, or adverts…

I feel some experimentation coming on!