Found Poetry Project

Poetry is found everywhere…but often we do not recognize it. Poems are words that sound wonderful, beautiful, and strong, and that mean something very significant to the reader. This project will create strong words that are significant to you because you ‘found’ them.

Step 1. Cut out about 50 to 75 words from magazines. Choose any words that appeal to you because of their size, shape, color, or meaning.

Step 2. Lay the words out on your desk and read them over and over. Look for an emerging theme or pattern. Practice arranging them to make sentences. See what statements or sense you can make out of them. You do not need to use them all, and you may find that you need an additional and specific word. You may have to go back and find articles (a, an, the) and conjunctions (or, for, and, but, so, nor).

Step 3. Ask others in class to look at what you have produced. See what they think. Help each other out with advice and ideas.

Step 4. After you think you have a good, strong expression about something that is important to you, and after you have made the words sound beautiful, with maybe even some alliteration, some rhythm & rhyme, some assonance and consonance, some similes and metaphors, a personification here and there, lay them out on a piece of construction paper in a clever or creative pattern.

Step 5. Glue it down!