Found Poems Propagate in the New Media

Found poems are made from the snippets of language created for other purposes, collaged together, or sometimes simply cut into lines to make visible their poetic nature. It used to be that found poems came from scraps of paper — a torn letter, a strip of newsprint used to wrap a fish, tickets dropped at the entrance to the ballpark. More recently, poets began to notice found poems in the streams of words online, most particularly in spam emails — as in our 2007 posting, “21st Century Found Poetry: Magnets on the Fridge, Spam Words in the Email.” Poems can be plucked from the vast rivers of words emanating from public political figures like Donald Rumsfeld and Sarah Palin.

The brevity and compression of the newest forms of electronic communication — texting and Twitter — would seem to make them particularly susceptible to a poetic reading, and someone has definitely noticed. Andre Gheorghe, a Romanian Web developer, has created The Longest Poem in the World by putting together public tweets that rhyme, making a gigantic found poem that he says is growing 4,000 new verses every day.