A Primer of Found Poetry

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.

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