Reading · Writing until the light goes out

Many years ago I was introduced to Found Poetry by the poet John Birtwhistle who was Writer-in-Residence at Southampton University at the time. I played around with the concept for a while back then, returning to it many years later. (At this point I should say that ‘found’ poems are definitely not a staple of mine; I haven’t written one for a number of years now. John — who went on to teach English at the University of York — still writes some found poetry; see ‘All History Will Be Cleared’ in his 2020 collection, in the event.)

Without doubt not guaranteeing the production of ‘great’ poetry, the process can be really useful in developing editing skills — especially as it can help to distance us from the tools of our trade, make us look at words more dispassionately… And given we’ll inevitably need to kill off at least some of our darlings along the way, isn’t that a useful experience to have?

It can also be a useful exercise for those who say “I can’t/don’t write poetry.”

Anyway, here are some slides from that workshop:

And finally the question of plagiarism…

Is Found Poetry plagiarism? It’s a tricky question. I once had a poem of mine published under someone else’s name: they’d stolen it without my knowledge, changed about six words, added their name at the end…

In general I would suggest that if you change the sequence of the origin words, their underlying meaning, format (e.g. prose to poem), tone, punctuation, rhythm and intent, and if you embellish the words with your own (i.e. the output is radically different from the input in virtually all facets) then the answer should be ‘no’.

Here are a few thoughts from the workshop:

Of course, Artificial Intelligence may be proving that, when it comes to creative writing, the notion of ‘ownership’ is nowadays more or less redundant…

Found Poetry anyone?

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