Poetry Challenge #4: Found Poem

Okay, folks, 

I thought I would give us a break from scrutinizing our word choice and worrying about syllable counts to bring you one of my favorite forms of poetry: the found poem.

A found poem is sort of the literary equivalent of a collage. A true found poem is actually writing you found somewhere else, whether that is an advertisement, a conversation, a novel, speech, or even another poem. True found poems do not add any new words to what was found, but the punctuation and line breaks are up to the poet. If necessary, you can change verb tenses, pronouns, etc. to fit what you want the poem to look like. Ezra Pound (in his Cantos) and T.S. Eliot (in The Waste Land) worked pieces of literature into these larger poetic works, but found poetry can be much shorter as well. One of my favorite examples of found poetry comes from William Carlos Williams.

This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams
I have eaten  the plums  that were in  the icebox  and which  you were probably saving  for breakfast   Forgive me  they were delicious so sweet  and so cold

As you can see, this sounds like a note someone left on the refrigerator door or on the kitchen table to explain what had happened, but Williams plays with the formatting to make it into a poem. I love that! You can see another example of a found poem on my husband Bill's blog here.  There is a more thorough description and more examples available at Poets.org. I have that site bookmarked, there is a ton of good stuff there!

For my own example, because I have already had various of his songs running through my head since the news of his death took over the TV airwaves, I chose to pull lines from many different Michael Jackson songs to create a found poem. I originally planned to only use one line from each song, but some of the songs have such short "lines" that I grabbed several. I also tried to keep to songs that were love-themed, and ones that Michael actually wrote himself. Hopefully it works.

On Love (after M. Jackson)

Eternal (ah eternal) love shines in my eyes (ooh)

There’s a magic that must be love

You got to be startin’ somethin’

Cause I can thrill you more than any ghost who would dare to try

Every night she walks right in my dreams

She said I am the one who will dance on the floor in the round

And be careful of what you do cause the lie becomes the truth

Electric eyes are ev’rywhere

You're every wonder in this world to me

You're just a product of loveliness

And the whole world has to answer right now

You’re just another part of me

Each time the wind blows

I hear your voice so

I call your name

We were so young

And innocent then

There’s a place in

Your heart

And I know that it is love

I can’t let her get away

Now I believe in miracles

And a miracle

Has happened tonight

Kiss me and free me

You're always in my heart

You rocked my world, you know you did 

All I gotta say is that I must be dreaming, can’t be real 

You help me understand 

That love is the answer to all that I am

Well, there you have it. I hope you have fun looking at the world through a poet's eyes this week, and please share what you find here!