Found Poetry—generating poems from existing prose

Directions:

1. Read the excerpted prose you received on handout

2. Highlight or underline words, phrases, and concise clauses that pull you—we’re usually
“pulled” by intriguing, powerful, poetic words or phrases. Try to avoid picking a whole
sentence—pick the word or phrase in the sentence that holds its power.

3. Copy the material you highlighted onto a clean sheet of notebook paper.
a. In doing so, be sure that each highlighted/underlined chunk is placed on its own
line.
b. You should end up with a single word, a phrase, or a concise clause on each line of
your paper so that you have a vertical line of the highlighted/underlined chunks
running down the left margin of your page.

4. Repeat steps 1-3 with a second piece of excerpted prose (handout 2).

5. Read each of your two poetic renderings of these prose pieces and decide which one you
feel has more promise. Once you’ve decided move onto step 6.

6. Read your selected poetic rendering and make some writerly decisions.
a. It might turn out that some of the words/phrases you selected “stick out” in an odd
way or just don’t seem to fit with the others. Feel free to line through them so
they’ll be cut from the next draft.
b. You’ll likely need to add a word or words in spots, or even a whole line, to help
what’s happening on the page make more sense to readers. You might have to
change verb conjugation.
c. As you add material, make sure you keep track of what belonged to the original
author and what’s yours. You could do this by adding quotes around the material
on each line or by writing what you add to the poem in a different color on your
page.

7. Electronically create a clean draft of your found poem, reflecting the revisions made in
step 6.
a. As you write, consider placement and arrangement. If you would like to add some
space or indent some of the lines to create emphasis and convey meaning, feel free
to do so.
b. Consider how you will make clear to readers what portions of the poem belong to
the original author. You might put everything that was yours in italics, for example.
If you conjugated any of the author’s original verbs for sensibility, surround such
words with brackets.
c. Title your drafted poem.
 d. Add a line giving credit to the original source under your title. Sources: The Bell
Jar by Sylvia Plath (1-2) and The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (11-12).

8. Print your poem and staple it atop your process work [original excerpt at the bottom and
initial rendering w/notes for revision (steps 3 & 6 above) in the middle].

9. Read your finished poem independently and decide whether you’ll be sharing the whole
poem or just a consecutive 5-10 line excerpt from it (highlight/bracket the lines if this is
the case) with the class.

10. Share aloud with the class! :o)

NOTE to Teachers

Possible Uses for Found Poetry:

 Use powerful passages (that don’t give TOO much away) to introduce kids to books
for potential reading through SSR—this works for fiction and literary nonfiction texts.
o Pick out 4-5 passages from different books you’d like to see them read and
randomly hand out passages for the kids to use as the basis for an FP.
o Group the students together with the others who worked with the same passage
to share/discuss their FPs/the passage.
o Ask each group to elect one person to share his FP with the class via the doc
cam (to represent the passage for the group), or have all students post and share
their FPs with the whole class through a gallery walk.

 Select a vital passage from the whole-class novel (or maybe one from each lit circle
text) that you’d like the students to examine more closely.
o Hand out copies of the passage(s) the students to use as the basis for an FP.
o Have the students get into small groups (3-5) to discuss commonalities btw the
tone or theme of their FPs and that of the novel (or chapter) on the whole.
o Discuss together as a class; invite students to share their FPs when relevant
during the discussion, but guide students focus in the discussion toward style
and theme in the whole-class novel (your primary goal).

 Ask students to choose a passage of 1 to 4 pages in their SSR book that’s integral to
achieving their novel’s thematic message.
o Have the students copy or scan & print their selected passages and bring them
to class on the assigned date. *You can even require teacher approval of these
self-selected passages in advance of this date if necessary/appropriate.
o On the designated date, provide students with time to create found poems pulled
from their passages that convey the tone of and a significant theme in their SSR
books. *Theme, or a single thematic concept, can reliably be conveyed, but a
replication of the thematic message may be much harder to demonstrate in a
poem based on one passage.
o After each student completes the found poem, ask her to write short responses
to the following tasks:
 What is the tone of your found poem? Please offer textual evidence to
support this answer. In what way(s) does your poem convey the tone of
the novel or of the chapter from which this selected passage was pulled?
Please offer textual references to support this answer.
 What is the prevalent theme of your found poem? What message do you
feel your poem communicates? How is this theme relevant to and/or how
is this message connected to or conveyed by your SSR novel? Please
offer textual support for this answer.