Final Project: Found Poetry
I remember my friend finding out about Blaze Bernstein’s disappearance on a friend’s Instagram story. She had posted a picture of him in his graduation gown, his parents both with one hand on each of his shoulders, the image of him that permeates in my head. My friends and I posted about his disappearance on social media, eventually joining groups on Facebook dedicated towards finding Blaze. Each hour when we refreshed we would see new theories or minor details, waiting for any real news to come out. We found out that they found his body on Facebook. From Michigan, my best friend Erin and I were reading about his death, watching the collective mourning of people just like us who either knew Blaze or simply connected to his story. A part of me was thankful to feel included from a thousand miles away. But as I read more subversive comments, it’s the image of these posts that run through my head even more often than Blaze’s blue eyes.
Found poetry is lifting texts from non-poetic contexts and making the so-called non-poetic, poetic through refashioning them, reordering them, and creating something novel from it. It’s like a collage of words. These words can come from any sort of media, and I’ve mostly seen it in the form of newspapers where words are blacked out with sharpie. Other sources that are common are speeches, letters, famous documents, graffiti, or even other creative works like poetry. In the strictest sense of the genre, these poems consist exclusively of outside texts, and the words of the poem remain as found, whereas decisions of form are left up to the writer of the found poem. I plan on sticking to this convention as well. One of my favorite essayist’s, Annie Dillard, has said that doing found poetry doubles the poem’s context, as the source materials meaning remains intact, but now it swings between the new poetic context as well.
View the PDF of my chapbook below: