Poetry is everywhere.
Everyone who inhabits a language — and thus, every human alive — traverses a rich landscape of poetry. Every phrase that rings in our minds, every two words that sound good together, every quote we want to remember, are each their own small poems.
Far less — and so more — than what the academics would have us believe, poetry is both spontaneous and ubiquitous. Poetry is nothing more than finding enjoyment in the medium that we spend most of our waking hours living within. It happens by accident all the time.
The Found Poetry Project seeks to raise awareness of the poetry that appears anywhere we choose to look. As long as we have enough submissions (and maybe even if we don’t), we’ll post a new found poem every Mon/Wed/Fri. With a little luck, it will help tune our ears to take pleasure in the language of our daily lives. With a lot of luck, it will become a print anthology, as well.
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The Found Poetry Project is an independent blog edited by Timothy Green and Megan O’Reilly Green. It was conceived of on January 25th, 2005, upon reading a particularly attuned and eloquent missive by the actor, writer, and dancer, Racheline Maltese. That one slight paragraph, tapped off as carelessly, it seemed, as a journal entry, was more moving than any poem we’d read about the Iraq war up to that point. It was later published as a regular poem, without any mention of its origin, in Rattle #24.
For more on the Project’s origins and intentions, click here.