A Primer of Found Poetry

John Bevis

www.johnbevis.com

Attribution

Good artists borrow. Great artists steal. - Pablo Picasso A bad writer borrows, a good writer steals outright! - Mark Twain

It reminds me of a well-known quote by Handel – "Good composers borrow, great composers steal."

As Oscar Wilde said – or was it TS Eliot? – anyway, he said “Good poets borrow; great poets steal."

"Good artists borrow; great artists steal," said Picasso or TS Eliot or Salvador Dali – no one seems to know which.

I think it was Keith Richards who said good artists borrow, great ones steal.

-found poem composed from results from an internet search

INDEX

What is found poetry 4

Types of found poem 1: Intact text 7 The prime poem Accidentals Translations The retrieved poem

Types of found poem 2: Selected text 14 Notes on the selection of text Single poetic source Multiple poetic source Single non-poetic source Multiple non-poetic source

Types of found poem 3: Adapted text 22 Hybrid Found format Analytic Synthetic Systemic Text and visuals

The Making of a Found Poem 29 The finding and the source Methods and the effects of poeticisation Change of context, change of meaning Provenance

The origins of Found Poetry 32

Some Found Poets and their practice 35

Epilogue 45

WHAT IS FOUND POETRY?

Back in 2007, I gave a reading that included some found poems. It seemed a good idea to say something about them, and about found poetry in general. Not having a neat definition of found poetry of my own, I went online to see what other people had to say. Much of what I found was hardly an advance on defining “found poetry” as “poetry that is found”:

Found poetry: the presentation of a borrowed text or found object as a poem or as part of a poem - The American Heritage Dictionary

That wasn’t much help, so I had a look at Wikipedia. The definition showing there, in January 2007, applied to a very precise form of found poetry, the kind that is included in the curriculum of American colleges as a creative writing tool:

Found poetry is the rearrangement of words or phrases that are taken randomly from other sources (example: clipped newspaper headlines, bits of advertising copy, handwritten cards pulled from a hat) in a manner that gives the rearranged words a completely new meaning.

Strangely, that definition was illustrated with this ‘classic example’, extracted from William Whewell’s Elementary Treatise on Mechanics :

And hence no force, however great, can stretch a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line that shall be absolutely straight.

I say strangely, because the form of this found poem contradicts the Wikipedia definition in every respect. It is not ‘words or phrases’ but a single phrase, which seems to have been chosen deliberately, not randomly; and the meaning, far from being ‘completely new’, appears unaltered.

Inadvertently, the mismatch of definition and example points up the main issues that need to be addressed. We have to decide what source or sources may validly be exploited to make found poetry; how the text is to be selected; whether the words may be left as they are, or must be changed in some way; whether the original meaning may be preserved, or a new meaning is sought. We need to think about whether this has to do with discovering, or endowing, poetic qualities. And we should give some thought to how quality is to be assessed.

Regarding the source: anything goes, but some things go better than others. The more refined the original, and the less we change it, the lower the poetry quotient. It doesn’t take a lot, after all, to chop some fancy language such as the philosophical musings of Donald Rumsfeld into poetry-sized bites and claim the credit. Satisfaction here comes from spotting some hitherto unsuspected poetic quality in a piece of text and revealing it, to popular amusement or amazement.

We may achieve this by utilising a system of selection, such as running a window in a piece of card across a page of a newspaper or book, until some constellation of words grabs our attention. Equally, we may discern new meanings in an extant text, and have only to claim it as found poetry, as in the example of this road sign spotted by the late American poet Jonathan Williams:

EAT 300 FEET a delightful morceau of surrealism in which the original text remains untouched. It is worth pointing out that the charm of a found poem is much enhanced if we are able to work back from it, to rediscover if only in our imaginations the original source.

We need to be slightly wary about the notion of ‘completely new meaning,’ not least because poetic meaning is something very different from literal meaning. In fact it may be useful at this stage to have a stab at defining poetic meaning (however long-windedly). I would say it is something like the way common feelings and associations may be formed by the proliferation of the sounds, appearances and meanings of words, as apprehended through something more than rational consciousness. And I would rate as a virtue of good poetry the interaction of poetic and literal meanings.

So to consider the ‘meaning’ of the Whewell poem, we can say that while the literal meaning is unaltered, the poet has endowed a new poetic meaning by the use of line breaks, by calling it a poem so that we are susceptible to poetic influence, and by bringing to our intention the latent poetic properties of the original. We might make the distinction that the purpose of the original text is a concise and unambiguous definition, while the found poem finds its purpose in the celebration of elegant language. Found poetry strives to give the same words a new purpose.

There remains the question of whether the newness of the context is significant. In the ‘Eat / 300 Feet’ poem, the meaning of the original text, within its context as road sign, was clear. Remove it to a new – poetic – context, such as a page in a poetry book or magazine, and meanings and interpretations and ambiguities abound, so that the reader is primed to read as many meanings as possible and to remain open-minded as to which is relevant. It is taken as read that a found poem, in taking words ‘from other sources’, creates a new context.

A nagging doubt about the Whewell poem is that while it scans and rhymes in a thoroughly orderly way, according to poetic convention, it is, in fact, a piece of found prose which accidentally fulfills the condition of poetry. Is this enough to make it a found poem? Or has it simply been misdiagnosed as a poem because of its appearance, in the way a limping patient might be misdiagnosed as having a broken metatarsal, when he only has a stone in his shoe?

I went back to the Wikipedia entry in May 2010, to see how the great trek towards veracity was progressing. Quite well, as it turns out. Here’s what I found:

Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and/or lines (and consequently meaning), or by altering the text by additions and/or deletions. The resulting poem can be defined as either treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the original.

Except that a found poem may be made without changes in spacing, or lines; without changing the literal meaning, and without additions, or deletions, this seems to work. It certainly works for the William Whewell found poem, still the principle example on Wikipedia.

TYPES OF FOUND POEM 1: INTACT FOUND POEMS

I found the poems in the field, and only write them down. - John Clare

The first category to look at is those types of found poem in which the original text is retained whole. Wikipedia calls them ‘untreated;’ I prefer to use the word ‘intact.’

Opponents of the idea of found poetry will find most to object to in this category, and this may be a good place to consider the issues surrounding the legitimacy of the practice. They argue that the ‘found poet’ has done nothing more than append his or her name to the original thoughts and words of some other author, so that found poetry is nothing less than plagiarism. Marcus Bales put the objection succinctly in an online polemic about literary issues, Fighting Words 1 :

‘What is “found” in “found poetry” is nothing more than any good reader finds in any piece of writing, and that “finding” doesn’t justify trying to claim it as original work of the finder’s own.’

Bales tested the water in a series of spoof found poems based on text found ‘on the internet, in blogs, emails, bulletin boards, wherever’ which he edited, re-lineated, gave the title Found Poems and appended his own signature ‘in order to call into question the entire enterprise of “found poems” and “free verse”’. It is debatable whether this exercise has anything to do with the ‘enterprise’ of free verse, but on the subject of found poetry Bales had the frankness to publish the repudiation of the editor of Fighting Words , George Simmers, in this criticism of one of Bales’ cod found poems:

‘The virtues of this piece were there, I guess, in the original – unlike the sort of found poems that foregrounds things the original writer was not aware of.’

And this neat distinction is at the heart of the legitimate intact found poem – we are reading the original text through the sensibility of the poet , which makes us aware of hidden or unintended virtues. This is dealt with further in the chapter on the making of a found poem.

The prime poem

The result of a lucky find, where a written text has meanings beyond those intended, and which generally works in a poetic way, with perhaps some verbal dexterity for us to admire, or some intangible meaning for us to ponder, rather than – or as well as – being simply laugh-aloud funny. Jonathan Williams’ road sign is a good example, as is this, found in an index to CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics and reproduced in the online magazine Take our Word For It: Sea water, see, Water, sea

This tidy offering, from Thomas A Clark, is titled From A Bookseller’s Catalogue:

“A HERB GARDEN. Loose sheets in folder. Edn. of 250 signed and numbered copies. Moschatel 1980. Mint.”

What’s refreshing about this is the happy way it reflects the poet’s concerns, published elsewhere in, for example, his poem Two Evergreen Horizons :

Neat Norwegian Horizon / Spruce Sad Scotch Horizon / Pine with that aspect of concrete poetry which attempts to treat with the individual word in the most apposite and poetic way.

Most instances of prime found poetry are from written sources, and are often printed as a facsimile of the original, or at least make typographical reference to the original. Non-visual sources are equally legitimate, and announcements, radio extracts, and snatches of overheard conversation may all prove fertile ground. The provenance of this example by Simon Cutts is given in its title, A note for Jonathan on his 50 th birthday, overheard on the Southampton to Cherbourg ferry

will all members of the High Wycombe Youth Orchestra

please meet their conductor outside

the sweet-shop on C deck

Some found poetry has a way of speaking bucket-loads about its original context as well as standing up in the new one. Look for the telling snippet of conversation, classified advert (the best-quoted being perhaps ‘ Encyclopaedia Britannica for sale. Not needed, owing to husband already knowing everything’), or signs such as this, spotted in the newsagent at Rosslare Harbour, 2002, by Erica van Horn: PROLONGED READING NOT APPRECIATED Accidentals

These usually rely for their effect on linguistic errors caused by misspelling or misuse of language through lack of thought or facility. Generally they don’t work as found poetry because the original purpose is already confused, and what is written or said is inadvertent. So the effect of putting ‘accidentals’ on a pedestal is less poetic than comical. Examples, usually from periodicals and the press, are often to be found quoted in satirical magazines, radio shows and Sunday supplements. This, from the p arish magazine of St Mary’s Church, Penzance, August 2006, was reprinted in The Guardian , 19 August 2006:

‘The magazine reported that at a recent choir concert, two members of the choir sang a duet – ‘The Lord Knows Why’. Thanks are due to the Vicar’s wife who laboured all evening on the piano which, as usual, fell upon her.’

There is a danger that finding amusement in quotations based on faulty syntax and vocabulary by those writing or speaking in something other than their first language can appear patronizing if not racist. But as long as we’re aware of the pitfalls, there’s fun to be had from the capricious linguistic mix-ups. Bill Bryson points up cultural confusions caused by the decorative use of a foreign language in Mother Tongue , with examples from Japan such as the shopping bag carrying the slogan ‘Switzerland – Seaside City’. Entertaining enough, but as this depends for its effect entirely on the relation to its original context, it makes for unsatisfactory found poetry. (Bryson, needless to say, makes no claims for any of his citations to be within the realm of poetry.)

There are, of course, exceptions. This is a classic from the late Stuart Mills:

Made in English Iron in wetness Washing will where the original context, a washing label on a garment of foreign origin, is evident. What distinguishes this from the two-dimensional incongruity of most of this genre is that the unintended meanings resound in their new context – what could be more natural than a poem ‘made in English’?

Translations

A related source is the bad translation, parodied by Monty Python in the spoof phrase book containing absurdities such as ‘My hovercraft is full of eels’. Automatic translation, available through, for example, Alta Vista’s Babel Fish Translation (babelfish.altavista.com), can be a source of unexpected linguistic delights, such as this from Paroles Francaises :

Eh well here is, Madam the Marchioness: Learning that it was ruined, Hardly was it rev' naked of its surprise That me sior the Marquis committed suicide And it is by collecting the shovel That it reversed all the candles Putting fire at all the castle Which was consumed upwards. The blowing wind on the fire Propagated it on the stable And thus in one moment One lives to perish your mare, But besides Madam the Marchioness, All is very well, all is very well!

There is a certain following for the garbled products of Babel Fish, which are usually achieved by translating a poem or phrase from one language into another, sometimes passing through a chain of translations before the final translation into the poet’s native tongue. One poet has dubbed this type of poem the ‘hyena’, after a mistranslation of Heinrich Heine. There is scope for much sport here, although the final result often includes clumsy and dull phrasing among the occasional treat such as this ‘hyena’ of the first line of Wordsworth’s Daffodils :

I have wrong, I eat a cloud

Sometimes better results are obtained by translating a poem in part rather than its entirety. Here is a composite ‘hyena’ of another single Wordsworth line, still just recognisable as the opening of On Westminster Bridge , translated from English to various other languages and back:

Dutch The ground has to not show - no matter what - more honestly German Mass does not have nothing to represent honestly Japanese Showing fairly with the earth there is no at all Korean To endurance correction being visible grandly anything boat song it is not Traditional Earth no demonstration fairly Chinese

In 1944 Stefan Themerson created the concept of Semantic Poetry in his novel Bayamus . ‘Semantic Poetry’s business’, he wrote, ‘was to translate poems not from one tongue into another but from a language composed of words so poetic that they had lost their impact, - into something that would give them a new meaning and flavour.’ This was to be achieved by ridding words of their different associations by exact definition, so that the word ‘war’, for example, would be replaced by ‘the open conflict between nations, or active international hostility carried on by force of arms’. The resulting poem would ‘stand the trial of time, of space, and of translation’. An example is this Semantic Poetry translation of Drinking Under the Moon by Li Po:

The fermented grape- juice among the reproductive parts of seed-plants

O! I’m conscious of my state of being isolated from others!

Ah! body attendant revolving keeping & shining on about 238,840 miles by the (mean) reflecting the light Earth aloof radiated by the sun

into my mouth I take & while expressing the hope for thy success. swallow the liquid

Another slant on the problem of faulty translation provided found material for the poem Go Litel Bok by Mark Haddon, which came about through ‘the unplanned absence of my designated translator one afternoon in Certaldo’. Haddon relates how, his own Italian being non-existent, an unfortunate bystander with serviceable English was press-ganged into the job. ‘We girded our loins and took a string of questions from the local press. It is entirely possible that I described my novel as a spanner made of toffee and said something offensive about the mayor's arse. It was not one of the high points of international cultural dialogue.’

The retrieved poem

The method of creating this kind of found poetry couldn’t be simpler: change the purpose of a poem simply by changing its context. In practice this usually means relishing the unintended effects of amateur poems found in the local press or club magazines, on scraps of paper inside second-hand books, etc. This example, from a local free paper in Tipperary, sets out to celebrate and promote a new restaurant. But in the event it is hard to know which is the more bewildering: the food, or the inexplicable antics of staff or guests. All this, in a tub-thumping music hall doggerel:

The Poppyfield opened up today The Clonmel Park Hotel All glass and concrete, air and light It looks it might do well Panfried chicken, bacon wrapped With creamy pepper sauce Wok fired veggie korma Flames to the roof of course Owen kept the fire going Lorraine did cash it up Tommy went off with my card Fiona mopped up a sup Lena and Marie her nice, nice niece Sat there looked very officious The Manager walked around and smiled This Grand Opening auspicious Glad I was there. Enjoyed the meal Can’t wait to come again More Veggie Korma in a wok And bacon wrapped fried hen.

The ultimate retrieved poem would of course be when one takes a poem written by somebody else, blocks out their name and inserts one’s own. This, the directly stolen poem, would appear to have no virtues. However, the fantasy that even this might be a legitimate exercise was raised by Jorge Luis Borges in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote , a short story about a novelist wanting to compose not another Quixote, but the Quixote itself:

‘Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide – word for word and line for line – with those of Miguel de Cervantes.’

And the twist here is that the language and ideas of the original were current in seventeenth century Spain. Those same words written new three hundred years later had to be read anew, as archaic and affected in style, and with their meaning slewed by the historic events, and changes in ways of thinking, of the intervening years.

TYPES OF FOUND POEM 2: SELECTED TEXT

In the next subset are poems which comprise words or phrases selected randomly or deliberately from single or multiple sources, and composed in some way by the poet, as distinct from the ‘intact’ found poem which is presented unabridged. We can call these composite found poems .

Notes on the selection of text

There are various techniques at the disposal of the found poet for reducing the original text to found poetry by what Annie Dillard has called ‘editing at its extreme’. She explains the process she used in creating the ‘poems built from bits of broken text’ in her collection Mornings Like This: Found Poems , as: ‘The poems are original as poems; their themes and their orderings are invented. Their sentences are lifted from the books named. Sometimes I dropped extra words; I never added a word.’

This convention in which words retain their original order within phrases, while the order of phrases is arbitrary, is the standard for composite found poems. Changing the sequence of words, or, worse still, adding words to smooth the connection between fragments, is frowned on by purists, and in a way defeats the purpose of found poetry by striving for coherence, and thus risking premeditation, rather than exploring the potential of what one has been dealt.

Where the chosen unit of meaning is the word, rather than the phrase, a text may be treated whole by obliterating unwanted words, or highlighting wanted words. The final poem shows words arrayed in their original position on the page, surrounded by white space as in Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (a ‘poem of erasure’), or artistically obliterated as in Tom Philips’ A Humument.

Certain poets have an urge to circumvent the selective process, because of its tendency to reveal more of the mind of the selector than of what has been selected (what John Cage called the constraints of ‘memory, taste, likes and dislikes’). One solution they have used has been to employ variations of the cut-up technique pioneered by the Dadaists as a simple way of unveiling unforeseen possibilities of phrasing. Words are printed or typed on a sheet of paper which is cut into pieces with a word or few words on each. These are arranged or picked up at random. A simple method is to cut a single sheet into four pieces which are shuffled into a new order.

Brion Gysin discovered a variation on the cut-up method when using layers of newspaper as a cutting mat. As the scalpel cut through layers of newsprint, Gysin noticed that text could be read across the cut line from one leaf to another. The results of this first experiment were collected as Minutes to Go. In collaboration with William S Burroughs, Gysin later applied the cut up technique to both printed texts and audio recordings. Burroughs famously suggested the possibility of using cut- ups as divination: ‘Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word-lines the future leaks out.’

Other possibilities of automatic or semi-automatic selection were suggested in a letter from Thomas A Clark to Jonathan Williams, published in the latter’s The Loco Logo Daedalist in Situ :

‘… I’ve been making poems using texts which were ‘outside my own head’, and treating them in different ways: permutational, fragmentary, etc… I set about experiments like cutting columns in half, reading quickly across columns, or placing frames over pieces of prose. I think that knowing to look at all and knowing what to look for is rather a lot… Dom Sylvester Houedard and Edwin Morgan also use cutouts, but what is interesting is that we all use it the same way and get such different results.’

Jonathan Williams had himself experimented using a rectangular cutout to select text for Excavations from the Case-histories of Havelock Ellis , and describes the process thus:

‘The cutout… was about an inch and a half wide and two inches deep. It was positioned, variously rotated, etc., over various sections until material began to re-shape itself. The margins and the spaces become those left when the dross is thrown out. What I was looking for were the fire-points, the garnet crystals free of their matrix.’

Further experiments with the selective process can be - and have been - made using disclaiming tools such as dice, the I Ching, blindfold and pin, etc. The computer, too, can be co-opted, and in fact ever since the random number generator program was created back in the dark ages of computer science, computers have been used to churn out random word groups, phrases and poems. Results vary, but the general rule seems to be that the larger the word pool, and the lengthier the output, the less interesting the result.

There are now many jargon generators available on the World Wide Web, which typically reproduce the impressive meaningless powerspeak of the business environment, with more specialized sites offering jargon for particular arenas such as education, IT or local government. The classic configuration of verb/adjective/noun is used on, for example www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html to create phrases such as ‘strategize impactful partnerships’ or ‘cultivate synergistic technologies’, drawing on a pool of sixty or so words for each part of speech.

Slightly more sophisticated is www.clarity4words.co.uk/jargon.htm , which creates unique four-part reports of compellingly plausible buzzwords. Better still, www.scottkim.com/newmedia/randomjargon.html allows reasonable control for changing entire phrases or parts of phrases, to generate exclamations such as ‘All it lacks is a hard-coded online information optimizer’ or ‘What if we add an external streaming freeware plug-in?’. The Lazarus Corporation Text Mixing desk includes a ‘William Burroughs style cut-up engine’, a transgenderiser which swaps the sex of any gender-specific words, a ‘rasta patois’ translation device and a watergate-style ‘expletive deleted’ module, all or any of which may be selected to modify the original text in any sequence.

Poetry generators on the web tend to produce results that are tainted with too many ‘feeling’ words, or rely too much on absurdity for their effect, and – an equally common fault with handmade found poems – waffle on for too long, but we can hope that in this rapidly developing media a good poetry generator is perhaps not far off.

An interesting precedent for this activity was to be found in the Word Clocks made by the artist John Christie in the 1970s, which used the mechanism of pseudo-digital electric clock displays and replaced the number boards with word boards, to create an ever-changing array of two, three or four word phrases, whose leisurely flipping over into new and unpredicted phrases had a contemplative, if not meditative, tempo.

Single poetic source

The found poem derived from a single other poem presents the very obvious objection that it takes little work to make a poem of it, the less the better perhaps. So some radical paring of the original text is demanded here to make a found poem far removed from the original, a pruning of much, perhaps most of the source poem to reveal some very different line of sensibility. It is usual to keep the original words in their original order.

The tour de force in this genre is Radi Os, a reworking of the first four books of Milton’s Paradise Lost by the American poet Ronald Johnson. Critic Jon Curley has described how he ‘cut away the original to reveal, re-imagine, and interpret afresh the various textual forces radiating mutually from the imagination of a blind English Puritan and a contemporary American poet. We can attend to Johnson's book as homage, a posthumous collaboration, and a singular invention.’

This cycle works as a consideration of Milton and a critique of his meaning, but what perhaps brings the project to life is the interaction between the various understandings of creation – God’s creation of life, Milton’s of his poem, Johnson’s of his:

I started back, It started back; 'What thou seest, is thyself; And I will bring thee Image

The position of the words on the page here is, of course, the same as in the original, the white space signalling obliterated text.

This category of found poem is surely the most difficult to work in and it is not surprising that there are few published examples, but the achievement of Radi Os suggests that there is scope here for further ambitious incursions.

Multiple poetic source

Perhaps the most effective poem of this type has each line taken from a separate poem. It’s possible to do this using multiple works of a single poet, as has been done with for example William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, but the results tend to be mired down in predictability, unable to tell us anything we don’t know about Shakespeare or Dickinson while failing to break loose sufficiently to make something fresh.

Results are happier mixing different poets, and this is a useful discipline for creative writing as well as a teaching aid, in encouraging knowledge of and research into the poetic canon. There will be some formal shape to the end result, and the poet will need to apply poetic techniques to the found material to fit it into the structure of the whole. This example, taken from the results of Competition 3651 in the New Statesman , is by Peter Lyon:

Under a spreading chestnut-tree Twice or thrice had I loved thee. But she is in her grave, and, oh, Wastes beyond, wastes below!

I am quite sure she felt no pain. I wish I were in love again, My staff of faith to walk upon. Where have all the flowers gone?

Let me to thy bosom fly Under the wide and starry sky, High as a flag on the Fourth of July. She's the Broad and I'm the High.

So runs my dream, but what am I? Dig the grave, and let me lie: And shall do, till the last good-night - An infant crying for the light.

(The lines are by, respectively, Longfellow, Donne, Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Robert Browning, Lorenz Hart, Sir Walter Raleigh, Pete Seeger, Wesley, Stevenson, Oscar Hammerstein II, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, Tennyson, Stevenson, Thomas Love Peacock, Tennyson).

Single nonpoetic source

Into this category falls a large body of work produced in creative writing exercises at schools and colleges, where the student is asked to make a found poem from a given source such as a newspaper article, part of a book, advert, etc. The technique outlined in these assignment notes for students from a US high school is typical:

• The poet uses other writings to extract words or phrases that are meaningful or appealing to him • Scan the written material for catchy words and phrases • Highlight them or write them down • The poet arranges these words and phrases to make his own poem • Focuses on the beauty and sound of language • Celebrates the variety of language – meanings and concepts • Free verse • Has a title • Your found poem must be at least five (5) lines

Usually the emphasis is on making something with a witty, off-beat or novel meaning. The application of particular poetic techniques is not considered essential, much poetry of this kind tending (or, as in the above instructions, adhering) to the free verse model of self-expression poetry.

Examples abound, of course. Well-polished models are found in Annie Dillard’s Mornings Like This: Found Poems, a collection of poems sourced from 19 th and 20 th century nonfiction titles. This is the first section of Junior High School English , from a 1926 publication of the same name, titled A Challenge to your Spirit:

Girls and boys of America Are the hope of the world! You can’t evade it, young America.

And are you going to go on dancing And spinning on your ear? What are you thinking about, sitting

There staring into the dark? Haven’t you been lying around long Enough? Shouldn’t you go to work?

Find as interesting a subject as possible. Write as vivid a sketch as you can Of a person who attracts you or an animal.

Mention should be made here of various anthologies of found poetry culled from the writings or comments of the famous. Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld is considered under ‘The Making of a Found Poem’ elsewhere. Other titles include Innumerable Machines in my Mind: Found Poetry in the Papers of Thomas A. Edison , published by Dr Blaine McCormick, and Dancing on the Pedals: The Found Poetry of Phil Liggett, The Voice of Cycling, edited by Doug Donaldson. As with the case of Donald Rumsfeld, Phil Liggett’s Tour de France commentaries are capable of a distinctive detachment, and the publication of selections from them is perhaps more in the spirit of a celebration of the original than of discovering something new and unrealised within. Examples include Contender :

He is settling in. / He is recovering. / And he will kick in.

and Inferno:

There's our friend / the devil / who's joined us / the past few days.

A variation on this which deserves to be described separately includes poems made from internet ‘spam’ material. There are two distinct lines of interest here. One is where the source is an unsolicited email marketing, typically, prescription medical goods, ‘investment’ opportunities, and sexual items. There is a popular exchange of spam poetry, with online magazines and competitions. Given the rather predictable and limited vocabulary of many commercial spams, it is not surprising that spam poetry tends to be a little short on surprises, often tending for its effect on turning the tables and revenging the spammer with humiliation or absurdity. This is, perhaps, an act of exorcism for those spam poets who use email a lot and have time on their hands. An uncharacteristically formal example of spam poetry from www.satirewire.com is this, entitled This is not Spam :

Your name was obtained from an Opt-In Mail List, Your name was referred to me, *This message cannot be called SPAM under Senate Bill: 1618 Title III This is NOT Spam! Hey Donna, Hey Sam, Here's that info you requested! You were chosen by someone to get this E-Mail, You're in luck! YOU'VE BEEN SELECTED!!! You're getting this message because you subscribed, In response to your submission, To be unsubscribed there's no need to reply, This is a one-time transmission.

The alternative spam technique is to appropriate the randomly-generated texts, often derived from the content of published books, which are incorporated in spam to thwart the Bayesian filters designed to block spam by recognising key content words. These may, or may not, be grammatically consistent. This is typical:

Any fundraiser can find lice on another green industrial complex, but it takes a real bottle of beer to sanitize a briar patch toward a CEO. Some turkey can be kind to a shabby wedding dress. Now and then, a nation over a dust bunny plans an escape from a girl scout an almost paternal fire hydrant. A tornado can be kind to the turkey for the hole puncher. A hole puncher toward a fire hydrant competes with the paper napkin.

Occasionally one is rewarded with a sort of Lewis Carroll-like internal patterning:

Then, from sea to shining sea, the God-King sang the praises of teflon, and with his face to the sunshine, he churned lots of butter.

This type of poetry – or raw material for poetry – sometimes called ‘spamoetry’, is most likely to appeal to aficionados of meaninglessness; for the rest, the irrationality and abounding of random associations soon loses its novelty and the joke tends to wear thin. One is reduced to the sentiments expressed in Lucky Dip, a poem by Simon Cutts, in which the poet expresses dislike of ‘the texture of / your lucky dip / with its prizes / the same / as the rubbish’.

Multiple non-poetic sources

Many of the considerations relevant to poetry using multiple poetic sources apply here, but there are some idiosyncrasies to be aware of. The danger is that the choice of source material is so broad and varied that the sense of coherence, the veiled recognition of the original source, will be diluted. So a common theme to the various sources will help – textbooks on a common subject, such as gardening or photography, for example. This is from Sixteen Sonnets by Thomas A Clark:

when cattle sniff the air and herd together in corners rain will invariably follow when bees fly short distances dogs lie about the fireside it is safe to forecast rain when singing frogs croak when toads come forth in numbers it is a certain sign of rain when swans fly against the wind it is a sign of coming rain when moles are more industrious when worms appear on the surface one must surely forecast rain

Another possibility is to compile poems whose lines have a word or phrase in common. The starting point for the following example was a Google search of the internet for examples of how phrases like ‘never go to’ or ‘have you ever thought about’ are completed by different sources:

Have you ever thought about the beginning of the world and life as we know it?

Have you ever thought about putting a fish in your turtle tank?

Have you ever thought about what race would mix well with yours, to make a cute baby?

Have you ever thought about competing at the Winfield Flatpicking Contest?

Have you ever thought about getting a chin implant?

Have you ever thought about how much pain and agony your rhetoric causes people like us? TYPES OF FOUND POEM 3: ADAPTED TEXTS

There are various ‘impure’ ways of using found material, such as mixing it up with creative writing to make a hybrid poem, as TS Eliot did with The Waste Land ; replacing selected words within the structure of an existing poem to make a ‘found format’ poem; or by interrogating existing material to produce a deductive poem of the ‘analytic’ or ‘synthetic’ type. Systemic poems use a sequence of variations on a single line, using erasure, anagrams or other types of wordplay. Lastly, there are poems which exist within a visual construction, such as the partially-painted pages of a book.

Hybrid

A poem that incorporates elements of found and original text. It was particularly popular in the 1920s and ’30s, when poets such as TS Eliot and Ezra Pound seemed to be anticipating a kind of ‘world’ poetry for the first time, with poems including eclectic sampling from diverse languages and cultures.

But while this type of poem deserves inclusion in this survey, there are concerns about whether it truly can be said to be found poetry. Many poems include at least an element of quotation, but this does not make them found poems. There is a methodology to the treatment of text in a found poem missing from the hybrid, particularly the scrupulousness of using only words from the original. More importantly, an element of the unpredictable and uncontrollable is central to found poetry, whereas the fragments of text included in hybrids tend to be very much of the poet’s choosing and subject to his or her manipulation. While the inclusion of found text in, say, The Wasteland , is important, it is perhaps more clear-cut to regard this as a feeding-back of found poetry methods into the mainstream.

I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s’acose nel foco che gli affina Quando fiam uti chelidon – O swallow swallow Le Prince d’Aquitaine a la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih

- from TS Eliot, The Waste Land , V

Found format

In this variation, the principle is to take an existing poem, and change the sense or intention while retaining as much of the vocabulary and poetic form as possible. For all its irreverence, this can be a stimulating way of delving into the inner mechanism of a poem and by inference the mind of the poet.

Where the subject of the new poem is the old, the outcome may be considered pastiche or parody, which lies outside our scope. Best results may be achieved when the new subject is entirely unrelated to the original. It may be objected that this is a type of appropriation, an act of vandalism in defacing an old favourite, and poetry publications tend to shy away from publishing this type of poem as it smacks a little too much of juvenilia. But there is satisfaction to be had from working to what can be an exacting schema to make something that, with luck, stands alone. This example, derived from Arthur Rimbaud’s famous Voyelles, is given the title Combinaisons:

MECHANIC black, C HIPPIE white, F ITTER red, P ARK -KEEPER green, P LUMBER blue: overalls, I shall tell one day of your mysterious origins: MECHANIC , black greasy jumpsuit with gaping flies Whose shadows buzz with vapours of fuel

In sumps of darkness; CHIPPIE , whiteness of sawdust and sandwiches, Icing of impact adhesive, sliced white, hint of pickled onion; FITTER , purples, split re-treads, replacing beautiful tyres In anger or in the raptures of penitence;

PARK -KEEPER , cycles, divine whistling at the riding thereof, Spikes the parkland dotted with dogs, spikes the wrappers Which weekends print on broad studious flowerbeds;

PLUMBER , sublime pipework full of strange banging sounds, Silences traversed by leaks and by phone-calls: O the final straw, the cover charge and colourful lies!

Analytic

The label for this sub-set refers to the process by which source material is ‘analyzed’, and the found poem made with elements of both the original text and the results of the analysis. This is an open system, i.e. one in which material is selected from the whole, as opposed to the closed system of the synthetic poem where all material is used. For example, using a poetry anthology as source, the index of first lines might be reduced to an index of first words, and an analysis made of the number of poems beginning with the same word. The following is a found poem made with a selection from the results of that procedure for The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse:

How One What Five When Seven Where Two Who None Why None

Synthetic

The ‘synthetic’ label has been chosen to suggest poetry in which the vocabulary revealed through the analysis of source material is used in its entirety, that is to say there is an absence of choice in the words used. In this example, the final word of each of the poems in the Faber anthology edited by Don Paterson, 101 Sonnets, is collated, and those 101 words are synthesised into a new sonnet:

101 Last Words

Surprise, surprise! Rum, wine, grass, speed influence: Ambergris world, within’t gay villages, Finisterre girls. You me you me you me own together again, none part: thing understood endures.

Home pissed again faces fade come go mouth sink rotten hours slept worst night drop everything. Day away offices frost cold mortality dying elephant death Aware untold law: judgement wrought mirrors disdain.

Blood bred ungratefulness. Rest, rest. Recover. Renew. Long live life, sky, stone, bough, men. Bairn. Cat. Piranha. Thing is tame, were it deit.

That hour it abides, men lie. Upon horn, springs mast, ends day. Songs were none. Away. Away. Away.

The basic building block need not be the word. One exercise, to see how much damage an accent can survive, consisted of cutting up Hugh MacDiarmid’s Why I Became a Scots Nationalist into syllables, putting them into a hat and drawing them out at random. Any that failed to emerge in an attractive sequence were returned to the hat, until all syllables had been withdrawn. The resulting poem does not need to be quoted in full to give a flavour:

scansat loiter uke dibu yoibscay dirnl witten lemelothuroden smetny hey which may or may not retain a certain Scots burr, although the vocabulary seems to suggest the poem may have transmuted along the way into Why I Became a Hobbit.

We can go further than the syllable, of course, and various poets have used the letter as the unit of currency, as in the Systemic poetry of the next section.

Systemic

A technique devised by the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan. A single line of words, which itself would often be a quote or found material, is typed out. The same line is typed again directly beneath the first line (or copied and pasted), and this process repeated as many times as required. This is best done in a font such as Courier, which has the mono-spacing of a typewriter font, so that all letters occupy the same letter width and letters are aligned neatly down the page.

The poem is found within the grid of text by highlighting selected letters, or deleting unwanted letters, so that a new message is spelled out. An example is Morgan’s Message Clear , based on St John 11:25:

am i if i am he he r o h ur t the re and he re and he re a n d the r e i am r ife i n s ion and i d i e am e res ect am e res ection o f the life o f m e n sur e the d i e i s s e t and i am the sur d a t res t o life i am he r e i a ct i r u n i m e e t i t i e i s t and i am th o th i am r a i am the su n i am the s on i am the e rect on e if i am re n t i am s a fe i am s e n t i he e d i t e s t i re a d a th re a d a s t on e a t re a d a th r on e i resurrect a life i am i n life i am resurrection i am the resurrection and i am i am the resurrection and the life

Other possibilities for creating a poem based on the repetition of the single line include making anagrams. The permutational poem, an invention of Brion Gysin, shuffles the words of a single phrase into different orders and depends for its effect on the unpredictable range of meanings which may be derived. The original phrase is usually a found one, and in the selection the poet will be alert to the proportion of nouns, verbs, conjunctions and so on likely to offer the widest range of coherent results (or incoherent results, according to fickleness). Many, if not most, of the possible permutations will be discarded. An example is Edwin Morgan’s Opening the Cage , subtitled ’14 variations on 14 words’, which takes as its original text a line by John Cage: ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.’

Schemata such as these may be seen as ways of imposing rigour on a practice which, at its simplest – the found poetry basic of picking choice words from any text – risks becoming with habit facile and unsatisfying. For some poets, anything doesn’t go.

Text & visuals

A new context may be made for the original text by imposing a visual environment. This might be an illustration, for which the caption is found material, or as in the case of Tom Philips’ A Humument , the visual working of the discard.

An example of the former is A Handbook of British Birds by the poet Tony Lopez and artist Mary I French. Extracts from the original of the title publication are chosen for their ambiguity, word play or reference to non-avian subjects, which then form the theme of the accompanying drawing. So, for example:

The arrival of the Willow-Wren is frequently noted in a succession of waves, when thousands stream in for days together. For a while there may only be odd birds about; then, invoked or not, the song is heard everywhere. provides the caption to a line drawing of the sea. Other species are represented by the motor-horn, sandwich, lighthouse and so on, mentioned in the caption as relating to their name, life history, or vocalization. This sensory shift recalls Erik Satie’s charming poem The Picnic :

They have all brought cold veal. You have a stunning white dress. – Look! an aeroplane. – But no: it’s a thunderstorm.

The Humument is a project undertaken over a number of years by Tom Philips following the chance discovery of a book titled A Human Document by WH Mallock in a furniture repository in South London. Instead of erasing words, Philips obliterated parts of the text by painting over it, leaving sufficient words and rivers of white space to ‘make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words’. The resultant text relates to the original in much the way Radi Os relates to Paradise Lost , but it’s included in this category because the illustrative content equals, if not exceeds, the potency of the text.

What’s interesting is that however consciously Philips manipulates the text, he has ‘yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot be adapted to cover.’ By pure adventitiousness the book he picked off the shelf more or less at random suited his purpose perfectly since ‘Its vocabulary is rich and lush and its range of reference and allusion large.’ Philips’ comment that ‘there is little that I wanted to say that I have not been able to wrest from these pages’, found an echo in Jonathan Williams’ reworking of Havelock Ellis: ‘All that you could want is there’. Similarly, Mark Haddon wrote of the found poem he derived from John Buchan’s House of the Four Winds : ‘When I'd finished it struck me that one could apply the same technique to many other books… I tried a few, but with no luck. I now realise that the rules were not as arbitrary as they seemed at first, and that there is something about John Buchan's work (the tension, perhaps, between the florid vocabulary and the manly, four-square narrative) which makes it particularly susceptible to this kind of abuse.’

Whether those poets’ choices of source material was purely serendipitous, or whether some instinctive affinity led them to books that ideally suited their purpose, we can’t be sure, but what it suggests is that inspiration in work of this sort depends on the poet’s eagerness for his source material.

THE MAKING OF A FOUND POEM

Whichever technique we may choose for our poeticising, there remains the key question: what makes a satisfactory found poem? The answer must be one that engages the reader, and should also be one that adds to the stock of found poetry and enhances its status as a valid method of creative writing. This section considers how to assess the quality of a found poem by looking at an example which has had widespread coverage. (The example chosen is from a single non-poetic source, which is susceptible to most of the techniques in the found poet’s armoury).

Erstwhile American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld became known for his sometimes knotty, sometimes tangential statements, or as correspondent Renee Montaigne describes it, a ‘knack for the memorable utterance.’ A collection of these was published as Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld , by Syracuse Post-Journal columnist Hart Seely, who gave the title The Unknown to this, perhaps the most famous example, from a news briefing given on 12 February 2002:

As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know We don't know.

The finding and the source

One of the things we value in a found poem is that the poet is bringing to our attention something which would otherwise have gone unnoticed, as with Jonathan Williams’ ‘Eat / 300 Feet’ road sign. Not that the original text need necessarily be such an obscure source, but it adds to our appreciation if we admire the poet for spotting some poetic quality which in the same circumstances we ourselves might have missed.

In the case of The Unknown , it has to be said that this source of satisfaction is absent, because the news briefing from which it was extracted was widely quoted and reported on TV and in the press internationally. The poet didn’t have to go out of his way to find the original text, and there is no sense of serendipity. Hart Seely did spot the potential of the original text as found poetry, which we might not have done ourselves, although other members of the internet community did so independently.

As a rule, texts whose dissemination is limited historically or geographically, and which are therefore intended for a more intimate audience, tend to have the brightest colours and most distinctive accents.

Methods and the effect of poeticisation

As outlined elsewhere in this publication, there are various devices available to the found poet for translating an original text into a poem. In the case of The Unknown , a whole single extract has been taken from a larger whole, and the prose ‘poeticised’ by chopping it up into those broken lines that say ‘Slow down! – you’re travelling the bumpy road of poetry ’ whenever we stumble over them. As with the William Whewell poem, the line breaks are the poet’s principal contribution.

But in the case of the Whewell, the line breaks serve to present the original sentence in a conventional poetic form, in creating a stanza of four lines, each having four stressed and four unstressed syllables, and with a rhyme scheme. The Unknown, by contrast, follows a free verse convention, in breaking the line at natural pauses, where the speaker might have taken a breath. The poem is easier to read, not to say more intelligible, than if it had been presented as an unbroken line of text, and there is some pleasure to be had from the way the line breaks enhance the crusty oratory of the original.

The rule here is that the poet’s intervention in changing the original text need not be extensive, but it should be appropriate and witty.

Change of context, change of meaning

The definition arrived at earlier for the creation of a found poem suggested that while there need not be any change in literal meaning, there should at least be a change or introduction of poetic meaning. We can assume that Hart Seely was attracted to this particular speech by two things: the meaning, and the phraseology. The literal meaning, which some commentators have found opaque, is actually quite lucid in the original and unchanged in the poem. The poetic meaning doesn’t appear to have been affected, but what this text does have is the Rumsfeld trick of using words to tease and provoke, employing the politicians’ hammerblow of repeated words and phrases to drive home the catchphrase. Which is odd, when here he’s using that barnstorming rhetorical technique to deliver a commonsense pensée about managing uncertainty and avoiding assumptions. Whether Hart Seely was sufficiently browbeaten to mistake this for poetic meaning we do not know.

Rule: it’s important to see in the text something you think the author of the original has not seen. Don’t be wrongfooted by a wily old bird like Donald Rumsfeld.

Provenance

One criticism of found poetry is that it is very easy to put one’s own name to what is essentially someone else’s work. This is not an issue where the original has no intended literary merit, or indeed no named author, but obviously when that original is Milton’s Paradise Lost it is essential that acknowledgement be made.

Between those extremes is a somewhat grey area where poets sometimes do and sometimes do not acknowledge their sources. TS Eliot, for example, references some but not all of his borrowings in the notes to The Waste Land . Marianne Moore is more scrupulous, quotations from sources such as Report on the Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska being acknowledged in her notes, and often indicated in the poem by quotation marks. In her ‘A Note on the Notes’, Moore affirms: ‘… since in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest.’

As a tenet, common sense prevails. The rules of acknowledgement are similar to those which apply to quotations made in published prose. When a piece is based wholly or largely on the work of a named author, as in the Rumsfeld poem, that author should be named. Information about the source not only provides provenance, but adds to the understanding and, potentially, enjoyment of the found poem. If in doubt, include it.

THE ORIGINS OF FOUND POETRY

Found poetry ‘proper’, if such a term is not oxymoronic, came into being in the second decade of the twentieth century, a little before the outbreak of World War I. But some of the ideas of found poetry belong to earlier times, indeed the fundamental principle of incorporating a piece of text from one source into another is probably almost as old as writing itself.

One certain point of reference is the poetic form of the sixteenth century called Macaronics, a burlesque poetry in which words from a modern vernacular, with Latin endings, are introduced into Latin verse, so as to produce a ridiculous effect. The term was coined by the founder of the practice, Teofilo Folengo (1491-1544), a wandering Benedictine monk, who supported himself by his absurd verses, which he described as an attempt to produce in literature something like macaroni, a ‘gross, rude and rustic mixture’. The genre remained popular in Italy and France over the following hundred years or so, and was employed by Moliere in the ceremonial scene with the doctors in Le Malade Imaginaire.

Some other precedents we can acknowledge include the seventeenth-century George Herbert’s poems shaped to resemble columns or wings, anticipating the calligrammes of Apollinaire. Hidden messages, such as we find in John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, also have their origins in the prehistory of found poetry. One popular form is the acrostic, a class of poems in which certain letters and their positions are stipulated, usually such that the letters in a certain position of every line, when read down, spell a hidden message. This was used by Edgar Allan Poe, and particularly fascinated Lewis Carroll, who invented many variations in which more than one secret message was encoded into the poem.

It was the cultural upheaval of the early twentieth century which saw the emergence of what we recognise as found poetry. But if you were to look for the true source, that first found poem written by the first found poet, you’d be disappointed. There is no Gutenberg, no Edison, no Wilbur Wright of found poetry, no mother or father figure. There wasn’t a time, a place, a reading or a publication we can call the first. What we have instead, rather appropriately, is this - found poetry was itself a foundling, someone else’s baby. It was ‘found’ outside the poetic traverse, wrapped in the blanket of the visual arts. Some person or persons - baby snatchers or benefactors, to pursue the metaphor doggedly - brought it into the literary fold for it to be, inevitably, lauded by some and condemned by others as poetry’s bastard child.

There are, of course, still those who tend to look askance on found poetry’s humble origins, indeed who see its existence as parasitical. Who would, no doubt, be very interested to know exactly when that ‘borrowed’ text is going to be returned. One purpose of the present volume is to address those concerns.

If we don’t have a first found poet, we do have a movement, or cadre of movements, experimenting with art and writing in Europe in the second decade of the twentieth century, when the exchange and adoption of new ideas was brisk. And it was during this time that we can identify some of the individuals who inspired found poetry by their experiments in art. Picasso and Braque, of course, were making collages with scraps of wallpaper and newspaper cuttings. The Dadaists used cut-up techniques, while sculptors such as Marcel Duchamp began to exhibit ‘readymade’ work of manufactured commodities such as bicycle wheels and bottle racks.

The logical, if not obvious, step for poets was to apply such techniques to their own practice. Some of these – Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters – worked already in both disciplines. But some of the earliest stand-alone found poems are by that lesser-known French poet, Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), who began publishing identifiable found poetry in 1914. Mee Too Boogie , from that year, adapts a passage from a nineteenth-century travel book about Tonga, while Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles features a Union Pacific Railroad timetable and a prospectus for ‘Denver, the Residence City and Commercial Center.’ This dramatic piece, Stop Press, translated by Edward Lucie- Smith, is among the earliest of Cendrars’ found poems:

OKLAHOMA, 20 th January, 1914 Three convicts possessed themselves of revolvers Killed their warder and seized the keys of the prison Burst out of their cells and killed four guards in the courtyard Then they seized the prison’s young stenographer And getting into a vehicle which was waiting at the gate Departed at high speed While the guards fired their revolvers at the fugitives

Some guards leaped on horseback and went in pursuit of the fugitives Shots were exchanged on both sides The girl was wounded by a shot from one of the guards

A bullet killed the horse which was drawing the vehicle The guards were able to come up They found the convicts dead their bodies riddled with bullets Mr Thomas former Congressman who was visiting the prison Congratulated the girl

Telegram-poem taken from Paris-Midi January 1914

The tone anticipates the imperative of the forthcoming war in Europe for a literature concerned with the reportage of real events, as opposed to the creation of a parallel ‘poetic’ impression of reality. It’s interesting that the aesthetic this pre-empts is the wholesale appropriation, the readymade of Duchamp, rather than the fragmentary assemblage of the Dadaists. These two strains are distinct in found poetry, and continue to constitute the principal division.

Found poetry’s development over the past century has seen numerous innovations. Around 1917-20 Kurt Schwitters and Tristan Tzara were originators of the ‘cut-up’ technique, later to be revived and developed by Brion Gysin and William S Burroughs. Hybrid poetry found its voice in the writings of TS Eliot, Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore in the 1920s and 30s, and has been perhaps the most persistent variety of the species. The serial found poem has produced the weightiest tomes of found poetry in the States from Charles Reznikoff, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky and others from the 1920s on. The ‘poem of obliteration’ originated in the 1950s and was most famously championed by Ronald Johnson. The intact found poem, which has found recent popularity in the publications of the ‘poetry’ of various public speakers, seems to have originated some time in the 1950s or 60s.

Any attempt at a more detailed chronology than outlined above will be essentially confused and confusing, as the development of the genre resides in the work of the individual more than any sense of a ‘movement’ or group aesthetic. It seems fitting therefore to conclude with some brief remarks about individual poets and their connections with found poetry.

SOME FOUND POETS AND THEIR PRACTICE

This does not pretend to be a comprehensive survey, but attempts to detail some of the poets who have made found poetry central to their practice, some who have written historically significant found poems, some innovators, and a few examples of the many who incorporate found text into their work from time to time.

David Antin (b. 1932) For the American poet David Antin, found poetry has been the means of investigating the interaction of the objective with the subjective. Starting with texts such as Simone Weil's journals and an insurance manual, Antin found references to cultural values whose meaning seemed to diminish through meditation. His books, such as definitions and Code of Flag Behavior, were compilations of misunderstood texts ‘bringing not-understanding as a set of questions to puzzling commonplaces and clichés’. Antin describes his purpose as trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up his stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.

WH Auden (1907-73) WH Auden experimented prolifically with form, including the hybrid found poem, notably in New Year Letter (1941) which among extracts from Plato, Augustine, Wagner and many others slyly quotes Auden’s editor at Faber, TS Eliot.

John Cage (1912-92) The experiments of John Cage (1912-92) with word construction and syntax are well documented. Perhaps his most familiar device in this context is the mesostich, an acrostic in the middle of words or lines. The text may be from found sources, and the poems’ potency rests on the sudden revelation of a ‘hidden’ message in the spine of the text of the poem:

In the first place alMost immediAtely duchamp caRries a whisk broom and if a Critic drops somEthing he whisks it up and puts it in a vaLise markeD Unsigned memorabilia he is thinking of investing in Cuisinart to cHop up this collection to mAke it into a large single work untitled in advance later to be known as infraMation sPatial

Thomas A Clark (b.1944) One of the band of Scottish poets attracted to the possibilities of the found form, Thomas A Clark has also been a mainstay of the small press movement since the early 1970s, publishing under the imprints of Moschatel and Cairn Editions. Clark is unusual in utilizing cut-out and other mechanical means of adapting texts to achieve a poetic rooted in the landscape and the lyrical, a Ruskinian sense of the moral order of the natural, alert always to the potency of poetry to add to our stock of charm and wonder. One of his Sixteen Sonnets is quoted elsewhere. The Goldcrest , one of a sequence titled Adventures Among Birds and drawn from the WH Hudson book of the same title, finds him in characteristic mood:

You look to the oak tree and think they are there but you cannot perceive them.

Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) Bob Cobbing was widely regarded as the greatest British concrete sound or performance poet of his generation. Like Jackson Mac Low, Cobbing used dictionaries as source material for some of his found poetry, as a way of enlarging the pool of available word and sound sources while retaining a practice of language-based poetry. (Which, incidentally, raises the question of the off-limits of found poetry, since all poetry may be said to be ‘found’ in dictionaries). Cobbing’s fascination with the sound of words resulted in a prolific body of work remarkable for the eclectic nature of its sources, such as definitions, newspaper cuttings, manufacturers’ instructions, plant catalogues, place names, reported speech, and so on. A Short List of the Bishops of Paderborn is best read aloud:

HATHUMAR / BADURAD / LIUTHARD / BISO UNWAN / DUDO / FOLKMAR / RETHAR MEINWERK / ROTHO / IMAD / POPPO EVERGRIS / WILLEBRAND / OTTO / BALDUIN RUPRECHT / ERICH / REMBERT / SALENTIN

And Da-da-doo , from a ‘treated’ newspaper cutting, showcases Cobbing’s twin loves of sound- rhythms and absurdity:

When a Californian firm named Dy-dee-Wash sued Tidee-Didee Diaper Service for advertising itself as Didee-Tidee, a superior-court judge ruled against Dy-dee saying that Tidee-Didee’s advertising as Didee-Tidee could not possibly confuse customers of either firm.

Simon Cutts (b.1945) Much of Simon Cutts’ succinct verse suggests apprehensions of the material world which somehow bypass the filter of cognisance, to arrive seemingly untouched by human hand. This device of the poet interfering as little as possible with his raw material makes Cutts a found poet by default, though he leaves so little trace of his own intervention that it is hard to judge how much of a poem is ‘found’. Some examples of his work are included elsewhere; this is From an Imagist index :

I am old 100 I saw the first pears 66 O fan Sunset, The Swan, the 22

Annie Dillard (b.1945) Perhaps best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek , which has been likened to Thoreau’s Walden , Dillard is a writer whose oeuvre spans travel writing, criticism, fiction and autobiography. Mornings Like This: Found Poems, published in 1995, is in a way a single work, a group of related pieces in which texts sourced from published nonfiction titles are worked into fluent poems with some formality in the structure.

TS Eliot (1888-1965) TS Eliot’s The Waste Land of 1922, with its eclectic mix of quotations from eastern philosophy, The Golden Bough , Dante, Ovid etc, as well as other less literary sources, is perhaps the most often quoted example of the hybrid found poem, a form Eliot did much to develop and popularize. But where Cendrars et el seemed to find the use of material from diverse sources liberating and anti- elitist, there’s a suspicion that Eliot plays a more partisan game, bathing his commonplace quotations with a banal light intended to silhouette the profundity of those other, spiritual and philosophical, quotes.

Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) The foremost British concrete poet of his generation was without doubt Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose output includes books and cards, prints, editioned objects, sculpture and garden design. Finlay used found poetry in a number of ways, for example using various found translations of the same brief fragment of text to invoke a multi-faceted vision of truth in The Anaximander Fragment . He re- worked commonplace texts according to his distinct aesthetic celebrating modesty, beauty and wit, such as the one-line poem Small is Quite Beautiful . Names and registration codes of fishing boats were a perennial fascination, which he at times worked typographically into iconic word-clusters, such as Sea-Poppy 1 and 2, or sometimes as a single free-standing declaration of identity ( Shepherd’s Lad / KY250 ), or lyrical verse such as Green Waters :

Green Waters Blue Spray Grayfish

Anna T Karen B Netta Croan

Constant Star Daystar Starwood

Starlit Waters Moonlit Waters Drift

Among Finlay’s work in this context are texts derived from quotations, from the classics, poets, critics, the French revolution, to such workaday sources as newspaper cuttings. Some of his output could be described as found visual art, with graphic quotations from artists such as Malevich, Seurat, Juan Gris etc, making a point of breaking down our cultural compartmentalization in works which wittily connect, for example, the poet Wordsworth and the painter Wadsworth.

Brion Gysin (1916-86) Gysin is best known for his rediscovery of Tristan Tzara’s cut-up technique, and experimented widely with the form while living in Tangiers, introducing it to William S Burroughs. Minutes to Go , a collection of cut-ups, was published in 1960. A consummate innovator, Gysin altered the cut-up technique to produce what he called permutation poems in which a single phrase such as "I don't dig work, man" was repeated several times, with the words rearranged in a different order with each reiteration. Many of these permutations were derived using a random sequence generator in an early computer program

Ronald Johnson (1935-98) A landmark in the history of found poetry was the publication in 1976 of Radi os by Ronald Johnson (1935-98). This was a poem of erasure whose text was the first four books of Milton’s Paradise Lost . In place of the emotional distillation of Reznikoff’s Testimony , Johnson attempted to cut away the original to ‘reveal, re-imagine, and interpret afresh’ the meanings and sensibilities of the original through the vision of a contemporary American poet. Radi os is on one level a homage to Milton, but equally a unique poem in its own right. Some critics have gone so far as to proclaim it a ‘posthumous collaboration’, a particularly prickly definition applied to the practice of found poetry and one perhaps more acceptable to the electronic melding of the voices of Natalie and Nat King Cole. But Johnson is nothing if not circumspect, and his great achievement is a found poem that sits comfortably alongside the original, a commentary on and a conduit of the inspiration instilled in Milton.

I started back, It started back; 'What thou seest, is thyself; And I will bring thee Image

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) The Scots poet and nationalist Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) incorporated into his later work the substantial citing of political and philosophical tracts. This led to accusations of plagiarism, to which the poet's response was: 'The greater the plagiarism the greater the work of art.' In this late poetry MacDiarmid is attempting on an epic scale to capture the idea of a world without God in which all the facts dealt with in the poetry are scientifically verifiable.

Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004) For Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004), influenced by John Cage's musical theories of systematic chance, poetry was manifestly concerned with performance, usually through the application of unpredicted instructions to unordered found texts. Call me Ishmael , for example, is an acrostic which takes the first three words of Moby Dick as its base, and finds the words beginning with those consecutive letters within the novel itself: Circulation. And long long Mind every Interest Some how mind and every long Coffin about little little Money especially I shore, having money about especially little Cato a little little Me extreme I sail have me an extreme little Cherish and left, left, Myself extremest It see hypos myself and extremest left, City a land. Land. Mouth; east, Is spleen, hand, mouth; an east, land.

Mac Low’s Biblical Poems (1954-55) subjected extracts of Hebrew Scripture to performance directions, including sections of silence, selected by rolling dice. In The Marrying Maiden: A Play Of Changes (1960) with music by Cage, the ordinary rules of grammar were supplanted by commands dictated by an ‘action pack’ of 1,400 playing cards, structured on the principle of the I Ching and a random digit table, which selected and ordered the script. A six-act play, Verurious Sanguinaria (1967) combined random words or phrases, one each from 26 dictionaries, with instructions and notations aimed to enable the reader or performer to form the work's meaning on each unique reading.

Marianne Moore (1887-1972) A contemporary of Eliot and Pound, Moore wrote what she herself described as ‘a hybrid method of composition’, and some of her poems are elegant models of the form, for example this poem from 1966, W.S. Landor :

There is someone I can bear- “a master of indignation… meant for a soldier converted to letters,” who could

throw a man through the window, yet, “tender towards plants,” say, “Good God, the violets!” (below). “Accomplished in every

style and tint” - considering meanwhile infinity and eternity, he could only say, ”I’ll talk about them when I understand them.” in which the quoted passages are derived from the introductory note by Havelock Ellis to Landor’s Imaginary Conversations . Elsewhere, her quotations often occur so briefly in what is otherwise pure original verse that they might easily be overlooked, were it not for her fastidiousness in quoting references and frequent habit of highlighting quotes in inverted commas. She was more persistent with the hybrid form than most, continuing throughout her writing life to incorporate references to everything from the New York Times to Cardinal Newman, from The Fables of La Fontaine to the progress report of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research.

Edwin Morgan (b.1920) The Scottish poet Edwin Morgan is an eclectic whose prolific output includes concrete poetry, children’s verse, sound poetry, and more. He is perhaps best known for the much anthologised The Loch Ness Monster’s Song, and The Computer’s First Christmas Card , which sees the sequence

j o l l y m e r r y h o l l y b e r r y j o l l y b e r r y" become, after many attempts:

"C h r i s m e r r y a s M E R R Y C H R Y S A N T H E M U M"

His work in found poetry covers a gamut of techniques, including permutational poems and, most significantly, his own particular contribution to the genre, the ‘systemic’ poem. Examples of poetry incorporating found techniques include Instamatic Poems (1972), which were based on articles Morgan found in newspapers and magazines, and written as if caught in a snapshot from an instamatic camera. Notable too is The Demolishers , a ‘combination of poetry and on-site recordings of demolition workers in Glasgow’, broadcast on Radio 4 in May 1978.

Charles Olson (1910-70) Olson was an influential voice of the post-war avant-garde, both as rector of Black Mountain College 1951-6 and as a published poet. In an influential essay, ‘Projective Verse’, he posited that poetry should embody the rhythms of breath and thought: ‘A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it… by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader… " Olson’s magnus opus, the Maximus Poems , was started in 1950 and continued to expand up to the time of his death. The subject of the poem is the voice of American history, as narrated by Maximus (named after the second century Maximus of Tyre, referring also to Olson's towering height). The form is an epic of place, the particular location of Olson’s home town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. It pulls together landscape lyrics with letters, including newspaper clippings, town records, memoirs and snippets of conversation to make a collage that encompasses issues from the provincial to the universal, and meditates on the interaction of history and place.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) The Cantos, Pound's ‘tale of the tribe’, is a book-length hybrid poem in 120 cantos, which quotes across the board from Confucius to Jefferson, including along the way Papal documents, poems by Cavalcanti, government and bank documents, as well as Chinese characters. In structure it rejects formal completeness and proportion, preferring the litany and the list. The work, a ‘poem to include history,’ presents formidable difficulties in its trawl of European history, Mediterranean culture, England of the seventeenth century, East Asia, the United States and much else, in which ‘references left without explanation abound’. Pound commenced the work in 1916 and the early cantos were compiled in 1925 into A Draft of XVI Cantos . The epic was concluded, or abandoned, in1962. ‘The life so short, the craft so long to learn,’ Pound would quote from Hippocrates. Bern Porter (1911-2004) A long-term commitment to found poetry has been shown in the work of the American poet Bern Porter (1911-2004). It has been said of Porter that ‘If there is a person who could accurately be described as having in his youth, invented the twentieth century, it is Bern Porter’. As a young physicist he took part in the development of the television, the atomic bomb, and space travel technology. The need he felt to suppress his doubts about these hugely significant projects gave Porter a sense of guilt, spurring him to reveal his vision of the reality beneath the gloss of American culture. As a publisher, gallerist and artist, he lived for some time in post-war Hiroshima, and in1961 produced his first book of found poetry (‘Founds’ as he called them) titled Wastemaker: 1926- 1961 . Porter’s three-volume masterwork of Founds appeared in the 1980s. The Book of Do's explores the paradoxical nature of advertising language in presenting a series of demands or ‘Do’s’. Here Comes Everybody's Don't Book portrays the converse, with instructions that you ‘Don't Worry’ or ‘Don't give up’ adjacent to images bound to induce worry or despair. Darker still is Sweet End , in which adverts for food and clothing mingle with gun promotions and obituaries. The ethos of Porter’s work suggests that the modern condition of life takes place in the spectacle, the common stream of detached images which obscure the former unity of life.

Peter Reading (b.1946) At the furthest end of the evolutionary chain of the hybrid construction, Peter Reading playfully includes both found and invented found material such as letters, newspaper cuttings, adverts, operating instructions and so on. The use of these eclectic idioms lends a veracity to the tone of the poems, which we cannot contradict as we don’t know, or can only guess, where the poems are citing and where emulating. As an example, Mens Talents in Difcours Shadowed out by Muficall Inftruments purports to be adapted from a publication dating from 1713, referenced in a footnote as being ‘in the author’s poffeffion’, a construction which alerts us to the possibility that this might not be all it seems. But maybe Reading really does ‘poffeff’ such a book, and maybe it does include descriptions such as this:

Your Drums are blufterers in difcours, that with a loudnefs domineer in publick over men of better fenfe and fill the place with a rattling found: yt hath feldom any wit in it: it’s the emptinefs yt makes it found.

Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) An emergent tendency in mid-century America was the serial found poem. Epic collages were created by Charles Reznikoff in Testimony: The United States (1885-1915): Recitative , the first version of which was published in 1934. This social document consists of hundreds of small poems taken from the text of law reports published between 1885 and 1915, covering the spectrum of American legal intervention in everything from railroad accidents and mining disasters to racial conflict and corporate negligence. The final version, at more than five hundred pages, is found poetry’s heftiest tribute, and raises a wry objection to the idea of an all-embracing American Myth. Reznikoff’s technique includes drastic editing, an entire volume of reports being reduced to as little as ten lines. Rhythm is created through linebreaks, and the selection of words is directed towards the unveiling of emotions, described by Allen Ginsberg as ‘The way [Reznikoff]'s done it is by simply being totally accurate to what stimulated the emotion in him, by observing so clearly or by being so present or by not trying to generalize it.’ This poem is characteristic:

"I want to ask you a fair question: did he say that he killed the woman?"

"No. But if I say he said that he killed the woman, I am to get half the reward. He is just as well off to lay in jail as to get out and get mobbed; for if he gets out he will be mobbed."

"It is pretty hard to swear a man's life away for a little money."

"Yes, but this is pretty hard times, and I am pretty hard up."

Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) An originator of the ‘cut-up’ technique and one-time Dadaist, Schwitters founded his own one-man movement in 1919 whose name, Merz, he took from a cut-up text found on an advertisement for the Kommerz und Privatbank . This was a multi-, or perhaps more correctly inter-disciplinary activity extending from Schwitter’s writing into painting, collage, sculpture and architecture: ‘I have pasted together poems from words and sentences so as to produce a rhythmic design. I have on the other hand pasted up pictures and drawings so that sentences can be read in them. I did this so as to efface the boundaries between the arts’.

Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) Tzara was poet, founder and manifesto writer to the Dada movement which, political and confrontational, promoting art as activity and with an emphasis on the demolition of meaning, was the natural breeding ground for the new aesthetic of found poetry. There was to be a new way, in music, performance, visual art and typography of expressing the newly-found virtue of inconsequentiality (‘Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong.’ wrote Tzara), and the rebuttal of expressionism. A salient moment was reached at a rally in the 1923, when Tzara created a poem on stage by pulling words at random from a hat, provoking a riot. Tzara’s iconic gesture has been much referenced, for example when Thom Yorke applied a similar method in Radiohead's Kid A (2000) album, writing single lines, putting them into a hat, and drawing them out at random while the band rehearsed the songs.

Jonathan Williams (b.1929) Poet, publisher, editor, designer, essayist and ‘the truffle-hound of American poetry,’ Williams is a champion of the American and Anglo-American avant-garde. Educated at Black Mountain College, he was among the group of poets who experimented with form and language, with an emphasis on wit, whimsy, metaphor and the combination of visual image and words. Williams’ own poetry delights in puns, repeated syllables, and the invention and manipulation of words, with an affection for mountain speech and folk attitudes. His poetry encompasses many forms from haiku to the neglected clerihew, and includes intact found poems from a wide variety of sources, as well as experiments with techniques such as the cut-out.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) One of the American poets of the ‘serial epic’, William Carlos Williams published Paterson in five volumes (and a fragment of a sixth) between 1948 and ’58, with the work published in its entirety in 1963. In form it is a long poem consisting of personal letters and newspaper articles interspersed with otherwise original verse. The title names the poem's locale (Paterson, New Jersey, near to Williams’ home town of Rutherford), central character (the partially autobiographical Dr. Paterson), and oedipal theme (eponymously in the pun, pater -son) of a renewed American poetics. Paterson bears aesthetic and historical comparison with other modern epic works such as Pound's The Cantos or H. D.'s Trilogy, but the closest comparison would have to be with Olson’s Maximus Poems.

Louis Zukofsky (1904-78) Another American poet working in serial construction was Louis Zukofsky, whose major poem “A”, was started in 1927 and published in its final form posthumously. The twenty-four sections of the poem reflect the hours of the day, with the first eleven sections concentrating largely on political themes interwoven with poetic forms including medieval Italian canzone, sonnets and free verse and the music of Bach. The much longer twelfth section introduces material from the poet's family life, while the remaining sections feature both political and personal subject matter, while showcasing many key historical events from the twentieth century. The work refers extensively to music, a relection of Zukofsky's collaborations with his wife Celia, a professional musician.

Epilogue

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.

- TS Eliot, Philip Massinger , from ‘The Sacred Wood’, 1921