Discover How to Make Found Poetry

By |2021-04-13T19:00:05-04:00April 13, 2021|

It’s National Poetry Month! And Amber Weinrich, one of our adult librarians, is providing an introduction to different kinds of Found Poetry.

And what is Found Poetry? It’s when you use something else – magazines, advertisements, dog-eared pages of favorite books – to construct your own poem. Find out how you can create blackout, collage, and cento poems with Amber.

Found poems are created from another piece of writing like pages of a magazine, newspaper, or book. Examples of found poetry include:

  • Blackout poetry, where you make a poem by blacking out words on a page and what remains is your poem. Think of it as addiction by reduction!
  • Collage poetry. Just like the name suggests, you cut up words and put them together to make a collage poem.
  • Cento poetry. Cento (or patchwork) poems are when you use and combine lines from other poems to make a poem of your own. This tradition goes back to the third century when poets would remix lines from Horace and Virgil.