Pruned Poetry – Reading & Appreciation!

Wrap up National Poetry Month by sharing your “Pruned Poem” at a special event on Tuesday, April 30, at 6 pm.

We invited the community to try their hand at Pruned Poetry, a local variety of Found Poetry and you are responding with a wide variety of thoughtfully thought-provoking, gently poignant, slyly amusing, and sometimes downright silly poems!

        prune, verb: to reduce especially by eliminating superfluous matter; to clip, crop, cut back, and weed out

Otherwise known as Redacted or Blackout Poetry, Pruned Poetry is created by removing words from an existing printed page. We have newspapers and pages from damaged books for you to experiment with. 

You can remove words by masking them with marker or crayon to create a poem. Your new creation can echo the original text, posit an opposing theme, or not relate at all. Play with words and phrases. Change your mind. Add a drawing. Make it rhyme or not, long or short, serious or funny. It’s your poem! 

This kind of found poetry goes back over 250 years to Benjamin Franklin’s neighbor, Caleb Whiteford, who redacted words and phrases in newspapers to create puns that he published in a broadside. More recently, it was popularized by Austin Kleon who turned to words on a newspaper page when facing writer’s block.

Poets of all ages can find inspiration to construct a found poem through the deconstruction of another’s text! Stop by the library to read – and see – the creations and join us at the end of April to hear them read aloud.