FOUND POEMS, find them and they are yours.

So many writers are also visual artists. You can combine your gifts in so many ways. Think of the words included in Cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque, the paintings of Stuart Davis, and more. Found objects can be art as Marcel Duschamps showed us when he turned a urinal upside down, and signed it R. Mudd. Here’s some advice for how to create your own poem from found lines:

“The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . . one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different-cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise-in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like. As many Shakespeare Rim baud poems as you like. Tristan Tzara said: “Poetry is for everyone.” And André Breton called him a cop and expelled him from the movement. Say it again: “Poetry is for everyone.” Poetry is a place and it is free to all cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaud’s place. Here is a Rimbaud poem cut up.

Tom Phillips has published books of found poems (poems that composed of excerpts of other poems along with his illustrations for them. https://www.tomphillips.co.uk/works/humument