Found Poetry

Found poetry is, broadly, any kind of poetry found in a prior existing text that may or may not be a poem originally. I've grouped various approaches under this category; this is more of a meta-technique than a form in itself, a way of thinking about and interpreting text in the world.

Cut-Up Poetry

Cut-up is a text technique in which a piece of text is split into words, phrases, and/or sentences (historically, this involved literally cutting up the printed pages of the original text, hence the name), then reassembled to form a new text, often with a distinctly more surreal bent. The technique has been applied to many—probably all—forms of artistic text, including poetry.

Blackout Poetry

Blackout is a poetic technique in which a piece of text has words removed (e.g. overwritten in thick black lines, hence the name) to create a poem from the remaining words. The resulting poems are often essentially free verse, but with the strict constraint that all the words will be in whatever positions they were on the page in the original text, which strongly leads to the use of space and position for artistic expression.

Index Poems

This is a term that's highly Seaglass-specific, but could be applied elsewhere; a kind of found poetry in consecutive lines of the poem-index list on this notebook's index page (the lines may no longer be consecutive if I change how the list is ordered). One side-effect of this is that each index poem's entry in the index is a duplicate of another, previous poem's index entry.

I've used the words as-is, but changed punctuation to whatever I felt read better.

Poems

  1. 2025-12-22

    the law
the cat
ruins

    A short free verse index poem. Made with poems from the 22nd of September, 2025.

  2. 2025-12-09

    Lost leaves return.
Lost
	in black rivers,
				ghost leaves.

    A little free verse index poem. Made with poems from the 8th of December, 2025.

  3. 2025-12-04

    thick on the window,
the deluge
after the rainstorm

    A Kelly lune index poem. Made with poems from the 22nd of November, 2025.

  4. 2025-12-04

    all-day rain;
the silhouette
steadfast in the cold

    A haiku index poem. One of the few straightforward haiku I've made via index poetry tonight. Made with poems from the 30th of November and 1st of December, 2025.

  5. 2025-10-11
    Lenin was a mushroom

    Lenin was a
televised hoax
impersonating the
illusion
of the
Soviet Union.

— Sensational Committee

    A blackout-ish septolet based on the wiki page for the “Lenin was a mushroom” TV hoax (as read on the 11th of October, 2025).