Perhaps to my embarassment, I just recently discovered the awesomeness of “found poetry”. For those of you who still may not know about it, I offer this definition from Wikipedia:
Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. The resulting poem can be defined as either treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the original. The concept of found poetry is closely connected to the revision of the concept of authorship in the 20th century: as John Hollander put it, ‘anyone may “find” a text; the poet is he who names it, “Text”‘.[1]“
Google it if you would like more details, but it really is a fun concept. For this week’s Writing Prompt Wednesday, I decided to give it a shot. The following is the result:
Venture Capitalist
From a Men’s Health article on Ashton Kutcher.
I have also provided the text below in case you find it difficult to read in the picture:
Sunday home, ready for football
iPhone and laptop, emails and tweets
I’ll focus when we meet
Working just to feel, dream, think
What a joke
We know marriage, record ratings, film
Recurring venture capitalist
This was super fun, while challenging, and I look forward to doing more in the future! 🙂
I’ve seen this format in a lot of actual books, where people black out the text, but I think your use of the magazine instead is a better idea because it’s not ruining a book. I also enjoyed the poem! 😀
I agree!! I’ve seen it done to books and it makes me cringe, I just can’t get myself to do that to a book, even if it’s one I will never read! 😛 However, magazines are free game! Although to tell the truth, I actually had problems finding even an article I didn’t mind blacking out… Men’s Health has some surprisingly wonderful and smart articles! I have giant stacks of old mags still around the house though, so I’ll probably pull most of my found poetry from there! Good to get some use out of them! 😉
Very true! I think I might have to raid some of our old magazines now…maybe a few of the National Geographic ones, or something out of Seventeen Magazine. 😀
Yes great idea!!! Ooooh the Seventeen would have some good ones I bet! Lol. I wanted to baclk out an article on the evolutionary purposes of jealousy… but it was such a good article I couldn’t mark it up! 😛