Mr. Flanigan's Creative Writing Honors class has been creating "found poems." According to Flanigan, Found Poetry is created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poems by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning.
Mr. Flanigan thought up the assignment a few years ago when he noticed a stack of old literary magazine from the 1950s headed for the recycling bin.
"For the assignment, students first write ten poem titles for poems that do not exist; they just make up random titles," said Flanigan. "Following, I ask them to circle one of the titles and they pass that title to a fellow classmate."
Flanigan then distributes a single page from one of the old literary magazine to each student. From this, the students make “found poems” by cutting the words from that page and taping or pasting them to a blank page, while using the random title assigned to them by their neighbor to help guide them as they look through the words of the old text.
According to Flanigan, they are looking to create meaning between the title and the collection of old words, which are of course limited. "The exercise really stretches their imaginations and increases attention to specific word location and context."
The following poems are on display in the English wing in Wheeler Hall.
If you can't see the slideshow above, view the poems here.