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'Found' poetry

In 'A Poetry Teacher's Toolkit', Book 3: 'Style, Shape and Structure', I suggest a four-stage strategy for getting children to write free verse. Stage 1 is to read many examples to them. This is the second stage: introduce them to the concept of 'found' poetry.

A found poem is a piece of writing, not poetry, that can be presented as a poem. It's a legitimate and fun way for children to create poetry.

Example from a tabloid newspaper:

Three baby doves

were saved from starvation

after bird-lover Mary Frink,

63, of Suffolk

let them eat food

out of her mouth.

 

And from a broadsheet:

The bullet

from a 9mm weapon

was embedded

in an upstairs window frame.

 

These were copied word for word, but are set out (to please nobody but me) as free verse. The second is distinctly haiku-like, but some people might belittle it as nothing more than prose, posing as modern poetry. Frankly, I don't give a hoot what label it carries. For me, there are added dimensions by laying out these pieces in this way:

* We pay more attention to the words because of their isolation in a white space (OK, yellow space)

* Line breaks, which may be thought of as another kind of punctuation, add significance by slowing down the pace of our reading, thereby making us re-adjust our focus.

Look at it from the other way round. Here's a piece of 'prose' by Ted Hughes.

'Only the sound of the sea, chewing away at the edge of the rocky beach, where the bits and pieces of the Iron Man lay scattered far and wide, silent and unmoving.'

* It's poetry.

* Put line breaks after 'sea' and 'edge', and the first fourteen syllables are even in perfect meter (dactyl).

* It isn't a 'proper' sentence, according to the rules.

* Hughes couldn't have hidden the fact that he was a poet if he'd tried.

* Extract from The Iron Man, Faber 1968, ISBN 0-351-13675-3

So, we have the concept of the prose poem. And if we can have poetry written as prose... I rest my case. Have a go yourself first.

 

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