Trying to find something that isn't there

In college, I knew it as erasure poetry. Now it's called found poetry. But really it's like that big square of letters you used to puzzle out as s kid, where you had to find the “hidden” words and the remaining letters spelled out the answer to some puzzle.
Only this is National Poetry Month, so I'd expect to find this “not” poetry form in the coffee shops and alternative presses and college dorms after midnight. Where I did not expect to find it was The New York Times.
Yes, our esteemed brethren to the south is in the middle of a Found Poem contest. The Times describes a found poem as “poems that are composed from words and phrases found in another text.” Guess whose text the Times suggest using to create these poems? If you said the New York Times, Bingo!
Where do I begin without just shrieking? I'm going to ignore the Times here for the moment. It's possible that they are just the messengers – the unwitting lackeys in this battle for the heart and mind of poetry. Instead I'd like to lay today's blame squarely at the feet of Stephen Dunning and William Stafford, two guys from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) that the Times use as a point of reference to justify their lazy and ridiculous contest.
Here's some jewels from Dunning and Stafford's article describing found and headline poems:
– the “nice thing” about found and headline poems is you don't have to start from scratch.
– Found poems celebrate ordinary prose.
– They are “against fancy language. Words with too many syllables”
– Found poetry is a reaction against “poetic language”
– You should not search for found poetry in sources such as song lyrics or poetry. Why? “They're both already poetry.”
Who wrote this, Sarah Palin? How's that fancy shmancy book learnin' workin' out for ya?
This is the source material the New York Times used for their contest. This is a English teachers’ organization. I have an idea for a great contest for the Times.
It's called the Write a Poem Contest. It's where readers actually sit down and think up words based on how they feel, then they write them down, then they arrange and edit them INTO A POEM.
Have we disconnected so completely from our inner mechanisms that we have to “create” poetry off cereal boxes? (Another suggestion by Dunning and Stafford by the way.)
Or, is the pace and contemplative nature of the poem unable to compete with today's world?
The found poetry crowd argues that this technique allows the writer to think simply, to “discover” direct meaning from unneeded and unnatural hollow words. Nonsense. There’s no reason to treat students like they have blunt head trauma. The joy of poetry, both writing it and reading it, is not from finding meaning in someone else words, but to create meaning from your own experience, and inner language.
Shrug off this lazy and self-serving attitude. If you want to look for the real reasons why so many people feel poetry is elitist and out of touch with reality, here it is. I'll take your poetry blog about unicorns and wizards any day over this clueless and, ultimately dangerous, approach to poetry.