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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 45WHAT 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, tochop 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 misdiagnosedas 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 50th 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
APPRECIATEDAccidentals
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 parish 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 wouldgive 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 translatorone 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 JorgeLuis 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 awatergate-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
ImageThe 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 19th and 20th 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, sittingThere 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 cornersrain 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, VFound 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, CHIPPIE white, FITTER red, PARK-KEEPER green, PLUMBER 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 numberof 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 anattractive 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
in
s ion and
i d ie
am e res ect
am e res ectiono f
the life
o f
m e n
sur e
the d ie
i s
s e t and
i am the sur d
a t res t
o life
i am he r e
ia ct
i r u n
i m e e t
i t ie
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 te s t
i re ad
a th re ad
a s t on e
a t re ad
a th r on e
i resurrect
a life
i am in life
i am resurrection
i am the resurrection and
i am
i am the resurrection and the lifeOther 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 SouthLondon. 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 wemight 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.
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