Writing as therapy: How ‘found poetry’ has resurged during the pandemic

Found poetry, a literary trend that has resurged during the pandemic, has poets reframing everything from rent agreements to history textbooks to discover a whole new poem

Poetry hides in plain sight. Inspiration can be discovered in receipts, spam emails and to-do lists, according to followers of ‘found poetry,’ a literary trend fuelled by the pandemic.

Known as ‘poetic collage’ to some, and ‘remix poetry’ to others, a found poem is created by borrowing words, phrases and sentences from other sources or ‘texts’ and reframing them, imparting new meaning in the process. Words from a passage may be blacked out, or fresh words added, to reinterpet the text. The style is considered an outcome of Dadaism, a European art movement that surfaced in the wake of World War I.