Ideas in Creative Writing – Found Poetry
Writing on the Bathroom Stall Finally Gains Value
Sep 2, 2008
The materials for constructing a found poem surround us in everyday life, lying within the pages of old yearbooks and love letters – perhaps even initials that have been long veiled from human eyes somewhere on a crossbeam, or even carved deep into living wood in the middle of a forest. A found poem incorporates words, names, or concepts inspired by writings stumbled by.
American Graffiti
As an example, graffiti provides an excellent example of inspiration for a found poem. Graffiti, at least professional or amateur graffiti rather than vandalism that is commonly mislabelled as graffiti – is street art, it possesses a message and a valid statement. It is urban and comes from the underclass – it is a focal point for folk rebellion, community, and counterculture. Words found on scraps of notes are often ignored while walking down a street, even witticisms found on the inside of a bar's bathroom stall are often funny and trite, enough perhaps to spawn a coarser piece of poetry.
There is too often a misperception of poetry as lofty, intellectual, academic, and inaccessible – the truth is that poetry also exists in very concise, rough, and sometimes crude terms. Found poetry has great potential to be the stuff of the most powerful kind – it recites words that were never meant to be spoken, private letters, and the random idiosyncracies of the human condition are often contained within these tiny slivers of information. Sometimes what seems the most irrelevant and mundane scrawlings can be harnessed as catalysts – their banality only serves to illustrate how common the joke, the concept, and the context really is.
Project : Found Poem Field Day
A very interesting, creative, and fun thing to do is to take a field trip with a notepad and digital camera. If you live in a rural area, you may want to take a trip to town and visit a few shops you rarely frequent, find a river,lake,or brook and walk along it – searching for something as simple as a discarded package. Beaches are also excellent treasure hunting locales! In urban areas, graffiti will certainly be more plentiful, as well as scraps of debris and fading signage. Shopping malls, bars, restaurants, harbours, video arcades, parkades – all wonderful places to search for pieces of ephemera.
This notion of transcience, of an idea or an inspiration left behind for you to find and interpret – is the very backbone of the notion of found poetry. It is a very experimental and malleable form of poetry and is extremely open to interpretation and execution, easily one of the least restrictive incarnations of the poetic form. The addition of an artistic photograph taken by you to show your inspiration can also lend a personal edge to the work and also give a frame of reference to any potential readership.
So, take a walk outside with a pen, paper, and camera – you never know what you might find!
