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Poetry Workshop: Found Poetry

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Poetry Workshop #3 Welcome to the third poetry workshop! In this series, you will be introduced to a myriad of poetic techniques and styles and discover how Tracy K. Smith in particular employs such tools into her own writing. Today, let’s dive into Smith’s various works of found poetry. What is Found Poetry? According to poets.org, a found poem is a poem that "takes existing texts and refashions them, reorders them, and presents them as poems." Most often, found poems are made up of text from newspaper articles, novels, street art/graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems. Think of a found poem as being a collage/assemblage of all sorts of different texts combined into one final piece of poetry. A true found poem consists only of outside texts/resources. The words making up the poem remain in the poem as they were originally found, with very few to no additions. The form of the poem, however (such as where to make enjambments), is left up to the poet. The Three Types
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Tracer Workshop: Smith and Pop Culture

Welcome to the second Tracer Workshop! In these workshops, you will learn about specific techniques, stylistic choices, poetic decisions, etc. that Tracy K. Smith frequently uses and makes throughout her several books of poetry. I have “traced” such aspects of Smith's work across all of the collections that I have read thus far and will be sharing my findings, observations, and commentary with you via these workshops.  This second workshop deals with the ways in which Smith uses pop culture references across several of her poems. This is most prominently demonstrated in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Life on Mars . In my opinion, Smith's purpose in employing these sort of simple, well-known references in otherwise complicated pieces of poetry filled with ambiguity, complicated metaphors, distinct images, and difficult subject matters is to reach each of her readers. Given that her poems are so complexly layered and often merit a second, third, or even a fourth read to tr
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