Found Poetry from Year of The Poet (Vol 20)

Featured in The Year of the Poet August, 2015 Volume 20.

Creating Found Poetry

Found poetry is poetry created from the words already on the page. Sometimes the poet leaves the order the same, sometimes using words already on the page but changing the order. Here are three found poems from words in the bios and quotes from three famous people: Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr and Virginia Woolf.

Found poetry can also be what is called black out poetry where the poet takes a page of text and blacks out with a pencil, pen, crayon or marker all the words that are not part of the poem. This leaves only certain words visible that make up the poem, usually read from the top of the page to the bottom.

A found haiku poem from Nature Neuroscience published in HumanKind Journal.

Einstein’s Peace, a Found Poem

Learn from yesterday
peace cannot be kept by force
achieve by understanding

Live for today
look deep into nature
do not stop questioning

hope for tomorrow’s
true intelligence
imagination
will take you everywhere

Martin Luther King’s Daybreak of Peace, a Found Poem

Starless midnight of racism and war
in the silence of good people
come here on different ships

Change the system
justice, love, peace
become a reality
in the bright daybreak of peace
unconditional love
the final word

Walk in the light of creativity
stand at times of challenge
work for our freedom
in the same boat now

We are all in the same boat now by Andrew Buchanan on Unsplash

Virginia Woolf’s Peace Poetry, a Found Poem

You cannot find peace
by avoiding life
in every secret of a writer’s soul

Language and poetry
friends and beauty
riot and extravagance
laughter and anguish

Cutting the heart asunder
value life more

The Year of the Poet August 2015 Volume 20, Inner Child Poetry Posse with Kimberly Burnham

Originally published in The Year of The Poet (Volume 20) at http://www.innerchildpress.com/the-year-of-the-poet.php on August 1, 2015.