If you like found poetry, you'll love Verbatim Poetry!

I'll start this post off with a poem.

On the Surface

Greed probably undid her in the end.
She was said to have taken a bait of uncooked tiger nuts,
which swelled inside her until she floated upwards.
Telltale empty paper bags were found on the bank of the river.
Or she may have been pregnant,

with 300,000 eggs causing complications, or stressed
after so much catching and releasing,
those constant brushes with extinction.

On the line between life and death, at Kingfisher Lake,
she breathed the fatal air and did not sink again.
And there she lay,
like Wisdom drawn up from the deep:
as golden, and as quiet.

This poem was posted on the website Verbatim Poetry, where you can find "poetry from the ordinary."  "On the Surface" is actually prose from an Economist article describing the death of a famous British fish!  The website features poems from the Shreddies Wikipedia page, fitting instructions for a bicycle wheel, and quotes by GOP candidate Rick Santorum, among many other unusual sources.  I think that the poetry found on this website translates very well to the classroom.  By having students create poems by using unexpected sources of inspiration, they would learn to judge for themselves the "sound" of poetry, and practice using line breaks for effect.  The fact that the words are coming from a source outside themselves takes off a lot of that pressure that students feel towards writing poetry, while allowing them to be creative with free verse.  It would be very fun to read what students come up with for an assignment like this!  

In their "about" page, Verbatim states that "language is everywhere that we are. Poetry is language framed." If we teach students that the everyday world contains little poetic gems, I think we would send a very positive and long-lasting message.

Because they take submissions, Verbatim has some great guidelines on their site for how to create a successful verbatim poem.  While they joke that all it really takes is to arrange the text from a non-poetic source into lines, they also go on to describe what is meant by a non-poetic source, and what kinds of changes to the text are acceptable or unacceptable.  Their guidelines would be fantastic to give out to students, since they are easy to understand and explicit.  You could even add an element of authenticity to the assignment by having students actually submit their poems to the website.


And now for a well-known poem from that famous American poet politician, Donald Rumsfeld:

         The Unknown

As we know,

There are known knowns.

There are things we know we know.

We also know

There are known unknowns.

That is to say

We know there are some things

We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,

The ones we don't know

We don't know.

from Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld (2003) by Hart Seely