Exercise from The Creative Process by Carol Burke and Molly Best Tinsley. (This was the textbook I used in my creative writing class at Cathedral City High School). copyright 1993
The Found Poem
“Look through ads, travel brochures, textbooks, the daily paper, and tabloids for a short passage (a few sentences) that might be interpreted in more than one way or that has a few interesting words you might play with. Experiment with line breaks, noticing that as you break a piece of prose into lines you create emphasis, with the greatest emphasis resting automatically on the word at the end of a line.
Notice the obvious linguistic playfulness in this student’s found poem based on a professor’s introductory comments fro an engineering course syllabus:
To the Stud
ent: You are a
bout to ex (a)
mine material
that will cap
tivate
and en
gross you.
Take time
to gr
asp the id
eas and con
cepts.
Make a D
et er
mine D
eFFort.
After all the class
revolves around
just three
fun
dam
mentals:
energy,
entropy,
and proper
ties.
Brett Howe”
Let’s try one and share!