{"id":478,"date":"2007-08-29T20:50:16","date_gmt":"2007-08-29T19:50:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/29\/found-fiction\/"},"modified":"2007-08-29T20:50:16","modified_gmt":"2007-08-29T19:50:16","slug":"found-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=478","title":{"rendered":"Found fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a genre of poetry known as ‘found poetry’ which involves take words, phrases and sometimes longer chunks of text from various sources and arranging them in a poetical way. Here’s a blog called simply ‘found poetry<\/a>‘ with the subtitle ‘pulling poetry from pages of prosaic piffle’ which features many examples.<\/p>\n

There’s a short story called Useful Phrases<\/em> by Gene Wolfe based on the phrases found in a phrasebook, including such gems as Pava pacch, t\u00eesh \u00f9tra. Ne\u00e9ve sort dufji<\/em>. (How like a ghost are the fountain’s waters! The flood carries away my riches), and Semphonississima techsodeliphindera lafiondalindu tuk yiscav kriishhal\u00f4n\u00e9!<\/em> (How delightful to discover in the shrinking sea a crystal blossom of home!”) – I suspect these phrases come from an imaginary phrasebook in a made-up language, but could be wrong. The story appears in Wolfe’s collection of short stories: Strange Travellers<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

After discovering this today on this blog<\/a>, I started thinking whether it would be possible to construct a story entirely or mainly from the phrases in a phrasebook, or maybe using a language textbook or grammar book as your source. Stories put together in this way might be called ‘found fiction’. Phrasebooks and other language books would probably be a good source of found poetry as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a genre of poetry known as ‘found poetry’ which involves take words, phrases and sometimes longer chunks of text from various sources and arranging them in a poetical way. Here’s a blog called simply ‘found poetry‘ with the subtitle ‘pulling poetry from pages of prosaic piffle’ which features many examples. There’s a short story […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,19,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-literature","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}