There is a variety of techniques you can use to create found poetry:
- You can take an existing fiction or non-fiction text and erase bits of it, leaving selected words and phrases that form a new text – a poem;
- You might select words and phrases from a text and rearrange them any way you wish as a poem;
- Taking lines from other texts and weaving them into your own poem is another method, in which the original lines remain intact but arranged in a new structure and form;
- You could also tear or cut up a text into words and phrases and rearrange the strips of paper into a poem.
Here is one of my own, on the subject of found poetry:
Found Poem
I am not stealing
I am not plagiarising
I am simply appropriating
Recycling
Words and phrases
From other sources
To restructure
Reframe as poetry.
I add
Substract
Change order
Spacing
Lines
To give birth
To a new meaning.
Sometimes I rummage
In old newspapers
Magazines
Articles
Adverts
Letters.
Sometimes I collapse
Pieces of fiction
Or non-fiction
Technical manuals
Recipes
And rebuild them as
Brand new poems.
One day
I might demolish a wall
To refashion graffiti
Street signs
Into a Banksy
Collage of words.
Image found on Pinterest
writing in north norfolk 