top of page

Found Poetry

Reviving the Text

Having spent a semester reading and appreciating renegade voices that playfully re-vision and resist familiar fairytales and stories, our IP3 Literature 2 students set out to do some ‘remixing’ of their own through found poetry. Found poetry (also called patchwork poetry) is a longstanding literary tradition by which poets borrow lines from existing poems and refashion them into a new text. As a practice of borrowing and reassembling, the found poem echoes the classical cento form and the visual collage. Mining the poems they’ve read in class and popular music for new meaning, the students have assembled different cultural fragments to present bracing perspectives on change, reunions, healing, beauty and more. Many of these poems embrace the theme of rebirth, and we hope you enjoy travelling with these pieces as our IP3 poets breathe new life into the narratives they’ve chosen to reshape. 

“But what are stories? Toys I twist, bubbles I blow, one ring passing through another.”

– The Waves, Virginia Woolf

bottom of page