Poetry Prompt with Google Tidbits

Like many of us, I'm sure, I find myself more and more relying upon the internet to locate material to use in my poetry. I often perform a search when I'm several drafts into a poem. For example, if I'm writing a poem about an artichoke, as I was a few years ago, I put "artichoke" into a search engine and find myself taken to a bunch of sites where I acquire bits of esoteric information about the artichoke as well as some diction I might not have thought to use. I then import some of the bits of information and the vocabulary into the draft. (Usually too much and then I have to ruthlessly chop some out.)

I also from time to time put my name into Google and do a search. (Don't pretend that you've never done that!) It's quite gratifying to the ego to see what pops up. Among the good stuff, however, I've found some really weird entries that don't have anything to do with me or anything I've written. For example, my name might be included in a list of other women named Diane. Or I might find something at a clothing site about red dresses. So recently I started copying and saving these strange entries. A number of the lines resonated and I found myself thinking about them as I went about the business of the day. You know what that's going to lead to! A poem! So yes, my work of the last week or so has been a found poem made up of these strange Google tidbits. I'm calling it a found poem, but I could probably also call it a flarf poem as I understand flarf to be poetry created using search engines.

So if you're looking for a fun prompt, search your name on Google, collect the odd pieces of information, and assemble them into a found poem. If you don't get enough material, use other search engines such as dogpile.com or msn.com. You may rearrange the lines as you like. You may change verb tense, add or delete "s," truncate lines, or make a composite line out of several. You may also add maybe half a dozen words. Let the poem be as weird as it wants to be.