Found poems

Here is the definition of Found Poetry from poets.org:

Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.

A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.

Here is an example:

Sample Found Poem 

Prose Selections from Chang-rae Lee’s “Coming Home, Again” 

From that day, my mother prepared a certain meal to welcome me home. It was always the same. Even as I rode the school’s shuttle bus from Exeter to Logan airport, I could already see the exact arrangement of my mother’s table. I knew that we would eat in the kitchen, the table brimming with plates. There was the kalbi, of course, broiled or grilled depending on the season. Leaf lettuce, to wrap the meat with. Bowls of garlicky clam broth with miso and tofu and fresh spinach. Shavings of cod dusted in flour and then dipped in egg wash and fried. Glass noodles with onions and shiitake. Scallion-and-hot-pepper pancakes. Chilled steamed shrimp. Seasoned salads of bean sprouts, spinach, and white radish. Crispy squares of seaweed. Steamed rice with barley and red beans. Homemade kimchi. It was all there—the old flavors I knew, the beautiful salt, the sweet, the excellent taste. (p. 5) ...................

 I wish I had paid more attention. After her death, when my father and I were the only ones left in the house, drifting through the rooms like ghosts, I sometimes tried to make that meal for him. Though it was too much for two, I made each dish anyway, taking as much care as I could. But nothing turned out quite right—not the color, not the smell. At the table, neither of us said much of anything. And we had to eat the food for days. (p. 6) 

 Found Poem Based on the Prose Selection 

My mother prepared
A certain meal
To welcome me home.
We would eat in the kitchen
Table brimming
Kalbi, leaf lettuce to wrap the meat
Garlicky clam broth with miso and tofu and fresh spinach
Shavings of cod
Scallion and pepper pancakes
Chilled steamed shrimp
Steamed rice. The old flavors I knew
Beautiful, salt, sweet, excellent.
I wish I had paid more attention.

Shape poems can be simple and follow a different form

Poem Set 2

Swan and Shadow by John Hollander

Poetry

by Nikki Giovanni

poetry is motion graceful
as a fawn
gentle as a teardrop
strong like the eye
finding peace in a crowded room

we poets tend to think
our words are golden
though emotion speaks too
loudly to be defined
by silence

sometimes after midnight or just before
the dawn
we sit typewriter in hand
pulling loneliness around us
forgetting our lovers or children
who are sleeping
ignoring the weary wariness
of our own logic
to compose a poem
no one understands it
it never says "love me" for poets are
beyond love
it never says "accept me" for poems seek not
acceptance but controversy
it only says "i am" and therefore
i concede that you are too

a poem is pure energy
horizontally contained
between the mind
of the poet and the ear of the reader
if it does not sing discard the ear
for poetry is song
if it does not delight discard
the heart for poetry is joy
if it does not inform then close
off the brain for it is dead
if it cannot heed the insistent message
that life is precious

which is all we poets
wrapped in our loneliness
are trying to say

This Is Just To Say

William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963

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

The Red Wheelbarrow

Related Poem Content Details

BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

so much depends 

upon 

a red wheel 

barrow 

glazed with rain 

water 

beside the white 

chickens

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)

Related Poem Content Details

BY EMILY DICKINSON

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - 

That perches in the soul - 

And sings the tune without the words - 

And never stops - at all - 

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - 

And sore must be the storm - 

That could abash the little Bird 

That kept so many warm - 

I’ve heard it in the chillest land - 

And on the strangest Sea - 

Yet - never - in Extremity, 

It asked a crumb - of me.

Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson Edited by R. W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Blood

Related Poem Content Details

BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,” 

my father would say. And he’d prove it, 

cupping the buzzer instantly 

while the host with the swatter stared. 

In the spring our palms peeled like snakes. 

True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways. 

I changed these to fit the occasion. 

Years before, a girl knocked, 

wanted to see the Arab. 

I said we didn’t have one. 

After that, my father told me who he was, 

“Shihab”—“shooting star”— 

a good name, borrowed from the sky. 

Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?” 

He said that’s what a true Arab would say. 

Today the headlines clot in my blood. 

A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page. 

Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root 

is too big for us. What flag can we wave? 

I wave the flag of stone and seed, 

table mat stitched in blue. 

I call my father, we talk around the news. 

It is too much for him, 

neither of his two languages can reach it. 

I drive into the country to find sheep, cows, 

to plead with the air: 

Who calls anyone civilized? 

Where can the crying heart graze? 

What does a true Arab do now? 

Alliteration, Assonance, Consonance

Check out this link explaining three important poetic terms:

http://www.writingrhymeandmeter.com/rhyme/208-consonance-assonance-alliteration/

Ms. Guarino's Haikus

Spring Colors

Bright, purple tulips
Cardinals at my birdfeeder
Warm, shining sunlight



spring at school

students all outside
embrace the warm air of spring
can't think about school



Jolly Ranchers

Eunice comes to eat.
She likes the purple candy.
It is delicious.

Haiku

Poem Set #1

My Father and the Fig Tree
by Naomi Shihab Nye

 For other fruits, my father was indifferent.
He'd point at the cherry trees and say,
 "See those? I wish they were figs."
In the evening he sat by my bed
weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.
They always involved a figtree.
 Even when it didn't fit, he'd stick it in.
Once Joha was walking down the road
and he saw a fig tree.
 Or, he tied his camel to a fig tree and went to sleep.
Or, later when they caught and arrested him,
his pockets were full of figs.

At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged.
"That's not what I'm talking about! he said,
"I'm talking about a fig straight from the earth –
gift of Allah! -- on a branch so heavy
it touches the ground.
I'm talking about picking the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig
in the world and putting it in my mouth."
(Here he'd stop and close his eyes.)

Years passed, we lived in many houses,
none had figtrees.
 We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.
"Plant one!" my mother said.
 But my father never did.
 He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,
let the okra get too big.
"What a dreamer he is. Look how many things
he starts and doesn't finish."

The last time he moved, I got a phone call,
My father, in Arabic, chanting a song
I'd never heard. "What's that?"
He took me out back to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig in the world.
"It's a figtree song!" he said,
 plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
 emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.

 from 19 VARIETIES OF GAZELLE

* Joha - A trickster figure in Palestinian folktales

Arabic Coffee
by Naomi Shihab Nye

It was never too strong for us:
make it blacker, Papa,
thick in the bottom,
tell again how the years will gather
in small white cups,
how luck lives in a spot of grounds.

Leaning over the stove, he let it
boil to the top, and down again.
Two times. No sugar in his pot.
And the place where men and women
break off from one another
was not present in that room.
The hundred disappointments,
fire swallowing olive-wood beads
at the warehouse, and the dreams
tucked like pocket handkerchiefs
into each day, took their places
on the table, near the half-empty
dish of corn. And none was
more important than the others,
and all were guests. When
he carried the tray into the room,
high and balanced in his hands,
it was an offering to all of them,
stay, be seated, follow the talk
wherever it goes. The coffee was
the center of the flower.
Like clothes on a line saying
you will live long enough to wear me,
a motion of faith. There is this,
and there is more.

The Words Under the Words
by Naomi Shihab Nye

for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem

My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes,   

the damp shine of a goat’s new skin.   

When I was sick they followed me,

I woke from the long fever to find them   

covering my head like cool prayers.

My grandmother’s days are made of bread,   

a round pat-pat and the slow baking.

She waits by the oven watching a strange car   

circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,   

lost to America. More often, tourists,   

who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines.   

She knows how often mail arrives,

how rarely there is a letter.

When one comes, she announces it, a miracle,   

listening to it read again and again

in the dim evening light.

My grandmother’s voice says nothing can surprise her.

Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby.   

She knows the spaces we travel through,   

the messages we cannot send—our voices are short   

and would get lost on the journey.

Farewell to the husband’s coat,

the ones she has loved and nourished,

who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.   

They will plant themselves. We will all die.

My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.   

When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,   

when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,   

He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.

“Answer, if you hear the words under the words—

otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,   

difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”

Naomi Shihab Nye, “The Words Under the Words” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995).