21st Century Found Poetry: Magnets on the Fridge, Spam Words in the Email

There’s a long tradition of found poems — poems made from snippets of language created for other purposes, fashioned into a poem in the manner of a collage, or sometimes simply cut into lines to make visible its poetic nature. Isn’t this exactly what poets are supposed to do... make language new by making art from the very same words we use for so many other forms of communication, commerce, politics, personal persuasion? These days, the makings of found poetry come to us not on scraps of paper, but electronically:

from The Flint Journal (Michigan):
“Magnet poetry is born from chaos of random spam,” by Chad Swiatecki
“Chances are, you've not devoted too much thought to those big chunks of random text at the bottom of a piece of spam email.... But what we saw in the jumble was a kind of 21st century version of refrigerator magnet poetry, and decided to let a couple of local wordsmiths try to spin some prosaic beauty out of the e-commerce chaos.”

We took note of this phenomenon a few years ago, and began a collection of found poems in the About Poetry Forum.

from The Boston Globe Magazine:
Spam Poets, by Gareth Cook
“Drawing on the language of junk email, these contemporary wordsmiths say that new times demand new art forms.”

Now we’re calling on you to submit your poems made of found words for a new collection to be published here at About Poetry, alongside our seasonal and other themed anthologies.

Found poems elsewhere on the Web:
“Haiku Error Messages” at Salon.com
Ubuweb Outsiders collection (formerly known as “Found + Insane”
Found Poems by Bern Porter at Ubuweb