Reading these poems felt like a montage of those great classroom moments when students are writing something they care about and the loudest sound in the room is the sound of pen scratching paper. Though we can’t choose as favorites those that didn’t conform to the rules, we want you to know that we appreciated them all the same. If your poem is among them, e-mail us at us what poem you posted and give us your name, age, location and the URL(s) of the articles you used, and we’ll happily post your poem publicly. Nearly 70 poems that came in before the deadline are sitting in commenting limbo. Many of you forgot to post information we need to make your work public. The line limit, or let your own voices take over and created hybrids of source and original ideas. To me as a reader of your stories and as a writer and lover of poems.Ī number of poets broke our “rules.” In your exuberance, some of you exceeded The fact that you guys recognized it yourselves is doubly gratifying Poems) the best of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder, Richard Brautigan or Allen Ginsberg … sometimes, all at once. Many of the writers create their stories with short, punchy brushstroke-style depictions and accounts such that it’s truly like reading (if you space the stories out like I read the NYT online maybe 40 times a day for the in-depth, detailed quality of its moment-to-moment reportage of breaking world events and I’ve so often been impressed by the acute, angular, imagistic and We have to agree with commenter #94, Alden Marin, who wrote: Pick up poetry? Something that says, “Slow down and look at this - how weird or true or hilarious or gorgeous this thing is, this word or this phrase”? To read nearly 200 New York Times found poems in one sitting is to go to new corners of the vast Web site we thought we knew so well.

Others bubbled up after a third or fourth or fifth look. Certain common choices emerged immediately, while Each of us chose up to 25 favorites and wrote about why. Beginning next Monday, April 26, we’ll post one of the poems we liked best every weekday for 10 days.įour of us at The Learning Network read each submission side by side with its source(s). Today we want to explain our process and thank you for your enthusiastic response. The fun the writers had in spite of, or perhaps because of, the rigors of this challenge shined through everywhere. Others lifted whole phrases into strange, wonderful new contexts. Some poems came from that day’s breaking news, others from a mix of articles old and new, and at least one was composed from a piece published in the 19th century. What we liked best were the surprises: the poems that start off being about one thing and end up being about another the poems that comment on the article they came from the poems that smash together unlikely wordsĪnd images from several sources to say something new. Though the creations are, by definition, composed from Times sources that aren’t poems (and often aren’t poetic), our favorites have the startling turns of phrase and never-seen-it-put-quite-like-that-beforeĭescriptions that we expect of good poetry. Grocer, marijuana, Afghanistan, drought in southern China, Duke basketball and lice.Īll of these are subjects of the nearly 200 found poems we received this month in response

Volcanic ash, the Tea Party, spaghetti, mean girls, punk rock, Timothy McVeigh, Timothy Leary, Spanish spices, Chicano art, Haiti, Lily Pulitzer, coal mining, the Beatles, lettuce, gray hair, Alexander McQueen, a Brooklyn At least one poet who took our “found poem challenge” was inspired by this article. Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times Iceberg lettuce with blue cheese dressing.

Nytimes learning network found poetry