I received some wonderful cards for my thirtieth birthday, not to mention many more messages by text. I decided that as a way of saying thank you, I would make a found poem out of them. The official definition of found poetry is "a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry". An argument could be made that it's a way of cheating, because you're re-using something that already exists. But by placing conditions on what you write and how you write it, it catches the essence of what the process of creating a poem is about. More traditionally, these rules usually manifests themselves as a particular rhythm, metre or rhyming scheme according to either a poem's established rules - be it a sonnet, a sestina, a haiku etc - or a poet's own particular set of rules that he or she decides to place upon it. Contemporary poetry is often criticised for an overabundance of fre...