Poetic form
What is a Found Poem?
Definition
A found poem lifts text never meant as poetry — menus, signs, transcripts, instruction manuals — and reframes it with selection and line breaks.
The world is already writing poems; found poetry is the act of noticing. A safety notice, a diner menu, a court transcript, the back of a seed packet — lineate the right stretch of it and the hidden music surfaces: accidental repetition, strange formality, tenderness in the wrong register. The purest found poems change nothing but the line breaks, which is the form's quiet lesson about all poetry — framing is half the art.
The family is large: erasure poems delete most of a source text, blackout poems redact it with marker, and the cento collages lines from many poems into one. The ethics are simple and non-negotiable: name your source. Found poetry is honest about its borrowing — that open credit is exactly what separates it from theft, and the gap between original context and new meaning is where the poem lives.
Structure of a found poem
- Source text not written as poetry: signs, menus, transcripts, manuals, spam
- The poet selects and lineates but adds little or nothing
- Variants: erasure (deleting), blackout (redacting), cento (collaging lines from many poems)
- The source is credited — the borrowing is the point, not a secret
How to write a found poem
- Collect odd text for a week: receipts, warning labels, overheard fragments, junk mail.
- Hunt for accidental music — repetition, strange formality, misplaced tenderness.
- Lineate to expose it: break lines where the hidden poem turns.
- Change as little as possible; the magic is that it was already there.
- Name your source. Found poetry without credit is just taking.
Common questions
What is found poetry?
Poetry created by lifting text from non-poetic sources — a menu, a transcript, a road sign — and reframing it with selection and line breaks.
Is found poetry plagiarism?
Not when the source is credited and the result transforms the original. The form's openness about its borrowing is what separates it from theft.