Find Poetry When You Look For It

April is National Poetry Month! Last year, we explored connections between poetry and our permanent collection. This year, we’re asking you to pick up a pen and create your own found poem.

National Poetry Month poster

The 2012 National Poetry Month poster, designed by Chin-Yee Lai

Found poetry is the practice of taking words and phrases from a selected existing text and rearranging them into a poem. Using our museum, select your source for words. You could use exhibition wall text, labels under paintings throughout the galleries, the text in our welcome brochure, our website, even the blog. You must find all words in your source, even the little ones like “a”, “and”, and “the”. Your poem can be short, like a haiku, long, as in epic, or anything in between. Submit your poems in the comments section below, tell us where your words came from, and some of our favorites will be made in to blog posts.

For more on found poetry, see the Found Poetry Project and the New York Times‘s 3rd Annual Found Poem Student Contest.

5 thoughts on “Find Poetry When You Look For It

  1. Lunar Installation

    Silhouetted planets riff
    on the moonlit mood

    The perpetual rotation forces spatial
    perception above sunrise,
    nightfall paying homage to
    a weightless architecture

    Maintaining balance activates fragmented
    organic objects and extends ecliptic practices

    The ethereal glow of three-dimensional
    spaces filters the monumental skies,
    evoking the first outdoor sculpture
    inspired by science

    All words for this Found Poem taken from: http://www.phillipscollection.org/exhibitions/intersections/index.aspx

    • Britton- I love how you made all of these very different projects seem so beautifully cohesive by dipping into the language that describes them.

      • Art transported me to space…where I, an unnoticed speck taking it all in, eventually returned to earth seamlessly–finding myself back in the museum staring at a giant, seemingly weightless installation. What a lovely experience. Thank you.

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