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What is Found Poetry?
Resting on the step of a worn wooden playground, underneath Spanish moss swirling in the breeze, I found a green notebook. I flipped open the thin cardboard cover and ran my fingers along the light pencil strokes of “Johnboytrewq739.” Surrounded by the debris of a chunky pink eraser, he wrote without punctuation or capitalization—an even further simplified version of instapoet heroine Rupi Kaur.
“tailgate set as the sun sinks down memory made with the star above the tree no place to be” —John It’s rare we get to know a person without even having met them, but this poet connected with me. My mind corkscrewed with questions—how did this notebook come to be here? Could I find him to return his poems? What would I want someone to do if they found one of my notebooks?
Read it, I realized, and so I read on, inspired by the depth John wanted to explore his own soul, the quiet metaphors that made me examine my own pain. Found Poetry is rarely this literal—I confess to opening every abandoned notebook I’ve stumbled upon and John's was the only one that held poetry actually intended to be poetry. But it all fascinates me: Scrawled grocery lists that missed the trash can outside of Publix, to-do lists left by mismatched wine glasses in a thrift store—they’re all snapshots inside the minds of those that we will never know. If you found this list (that I just wrote), would the insight into another person’s day strike you as an example of Found Poetry? 
When do words make the leap from just text into Found Poetry? In a genre with the grayest definitions of all, Found Poetry is like a cloud—floating all around us and nearly impossible to pin down.
Even graffiti can be Found Poetry—imagine that our playground poet spray painted “John was here” at the top of the Washington Monument and you spied it during a helicopter tour of the capital. To an anarchist, that may rival the emotional reaction of an epic Banksy piece. For a statist, it may be a gross defacement—as unartistic as old chewing gum wedged into a crack on the subway. (Forgive me please for finding even that gum to be poetic.) 
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In the way that a bird watcher notices every cardinal that swoops by, I find poems everywhere. Some may say the absolute most unpoetic world would be one of finance and code, and drilling down even further—Bitcoin. Surprising as it may be, within the future of money hides a labyrinth of infinite Found Poetry.
When I first learned that a hardware wallet (a way of storing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies) involved the creation of a backup seed phrase, it felt like opening a fortune cookie. The words on the seed list combined in an order that fascinated me. I’d discovered a poem that was valuable both because it was the key to storing value and it was a gift of secret words just for me.
Pulling up the list of 2,048 possible seed words, there were colors, elements of nature, verbs—all the key components of poems themselves. If the real seed phrases I’d encountered all struck me as poems, what if I rearranged the list into more Found Poetry? And what if I added another layer of “seedness” by focusing them around my NFT nature photography?
Keeping the poems secret by using the unlockable feature on OpenSea allows the poems to be enjoyed in the true manner of Bitcoin seed phrases—as private moments; secret poems only for those that truly own them. In writing the collection of 100 poems, I draw inspiration from the photo I take, using seed words to fill out the short poem that embodies the spirit of the image.
But back to our Found Poet John—unable to find a way to get in contact with him, I left his poetry on the steps of the old wooden playground with a bookmark of Spanish moss. Some part of me thinks that he left it behind because he wanted it to be found, that in the depth of loneliness in his eraser-marked pages he was comforted by the thought that he’d make a friend—even if it was one he’d never meet, and I assure you, he did.
Whether crafted from coded roots like my NFT seed poem collection, scrawled as unselfconscious grocery lists, or waiting to be discovered on a playground—Found Poetry is all around us, and all it asks is to be read.
When I first learned that a hardware wallet (a way of storing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies) involved the creation of a backup seed phrase, it felt like opening a fortune cookie. The words on the seed list combined in an order that fascinated me. I’d discovered a poem that was valuable both because it was the key to storing value and it was a gift of secret words just for me.
Pulling up the list of 2,048 possible seed words, there were colors, elements of nature, verbs—all the key components of poems themselves. If the real seed phrases I’d encountered all struck me as poems, what if I rearranged the list into more Found Poetry? And what if I added another layer of “seedness” by focusing them around my NFT nature photography?
Keeping the poems secret by using the unlockable feature on OpenSea allows the poems to be enjoyed in the true manner of Bitcoin seed phrases—as private moments; secret poems only for those that truly own them. In writing the collection of 100 poems, I draw inspiration from the photo I take, using seed words to fill out the short poem that embodies the spirit of the image.
But back to our Found Poet John—unable to find a way to get in contact with him, I left his poetry on the steps of the old wooden playground with a bookmark of Spanish moss. Some part of me thinks that he left it behind because he wanted it to be found, that in the depth of loneliness in his eraser-marked pages he was comforted by the thought that he’d make a friend—even if it was one he’d never meet, and I assure you, he did.
Whether crafted from coded roots like my NFT seed poem collection, scrawled as unselfconscious grocery lists, or waiting to be discovered on a playground—Found Poetry is all around us, and all it asks is to be read.