Using found poetry to explore climate change

Found poetry is like a treasure hunt for words. Instead of writing new lines, poets find words or phrases in places like books, magazines, or street signs, and use them to create a new poem. Think of it as recycling / repurposing words to make new meanings! 

This can be a fun way to see everyday words in a fresh light. Found poetry can also be a way of exploring climate themes. For example, we can read science reports and policy documents in the normal way — to understand them and critically evaluate them — but we can also respond to them creatively. We can rearrange their words to express our own feelings, to raise up our voices or the voices of others, to ask questions, and to imagine alternative possibilities for the future.

Methods for creating found poetry

1. Just go looking

Find an interesting text, and gather words and phrases. Write them out to create a new poem. The poem can be of any length and any subject. It can make as little or as much sense as you wish. Often a poem will mean different things for different people.

Here is one such text you could use. It is an excerpt from a legal document, a landmark court ruling spelling the victory of young people against the State, forcing the government to change its climate policy.

2. Cut-ups

Print out the text, and use scissors and glue to create a new poem. And/or you can use old newspapers, magazines, or other printed matter.

Create a poem with some connection to nature and the climate.

3. Erasures

Print out a page that looks interesting. Then use a felt-tipped marker or Tippex to erase most of the words from the page. The words that you leave visible are your poem.

4. Procedures

Invent a rule, and apply it to a text. For example, you could gather together every sentence in which a colour word appears (green, red, indigo). Or you could write down, in sequence, every other verb and every third noun. 

Do you want to follow your rule strictly? Or do you want to bend the rules to create a different poem?

5. Look and listen over time

Carry a pen and notebook with you for a week. Look and listen for language around you, and write down anything that seems interesting. At the end of the week, arrange these scraps into a poem.

Examples of modern found poetry

The poet Grace Makhosazana Xaba created her own poems using the works of writers such as Mohale Mashigo, Lauretta Ngcobo, and Barbara Boswell. As quoted in the Johannesburg Review of Books, Grace used these rules:

• Wait for words to lift off from the page instead of searching for them.
• Use these words sequentially in piecing together the poem and never go backwards in the text.
• Use words as they are without changing them.
• Choose the title from the body of the found poem, one that best represents the essence of the poem. This is a variation of the rule I made when working on Ngcobo’s novel, where the first words to show up became the title of the poem.

The poet Nicky Melville (also called ‘nick-e melville’) has used found poetry in many different ways. For example, one project used the election manifestos of the major UK political parties. Melville chose a significant word (such as ‘freedom’), and gathered together all the appearances of that word.

A related term: détournement 

Détournement is a French word that literally means something like ‘re-routing’ or ‘turning around’ (or even ‘hijacking’). In the context of writing and art, détournement means taking an existing piece of media or art, and changing it in some way — usually to satirise it, or to reveal some true, hidden facts. 

If your found poem is a comment on the original text, then it might be considered a détournement.

Détournement was originally associated with the artistic movement Situationism, which flourished in the 1950s and 1960s. More recently, some artists have used détournement to criticise greenwashing. For example, they might take an advertisement that claims a product is “green” or “eco-friendly” and alter it to reflect what they see as the reality behind the claim.

Arguably, a lot of internet culture nowadays (such as making memes and viral content using news stories) could be considered a kind of détournement. Furthermore, many writers of the Global South, such as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, among others, have tackled postcolonialism and the complexities of modern African identity in ways that resonate with Situationist critiques.

Some other related terms include ‘culture jamming,’ ‘anti-advertising,’ ‘happenings,’ ‘collage,’ ‘bricolage.’