Found poetry

Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. It is a literary equivalent version of collage. Writers of found poetry pull words and phrases from various sources, including, news articles, shopping lists, graffiti, historical documents, and even other works of literature. 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 poem. The original language is reformatted to create the found poem.
The concept of found poetry is closely connected to the revision of the concept of authorship in the 20th century and its first known use was in 1966. Types of common forms and practices of found poetry include free form excerpting and remixing, erasure, and cut-up.
An example of found poetry appeared in William Whemwell's "An Elementary Treatise of Mechanics";

  Hence no force, however great
   can stretch a cord, however
   fine, 
   into a horizontal line
   which is accurately straight.

The writer Annie Dillard has said that turning a text into a poem doubles that poem's context. " The original meaning remains intact", she writes, "but now it swings between two poles."

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