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Writing Techniques | Part 4

Lost & Found Poetry

by Dr. Sorcha Fogarty

A good poet must know things divine, things natural, things moral, things historical, and things artificial; together with the several terms belonging to all faculties, to which they must allude. Good poets must be universal scholars, able to use a pleasing phrase, and to express themselves with moving eloquence” – Bathsua Makin (1673)

The ‘lost’ element of title refers to how poetry, like any other narrative source, can be mined from life experience whether first hand or otherwise. ‘Found’ refers to poetry that is already out there in the public domain, poetry in the guise of advertisements, notices in shop windows, horoscopes, recipes, bulletin boards, legal documents, ingredients on the side of a packet of tea (for example) or indeed, any text which doesn’t necessarily appear to possess poetic possibility.

"It’s not what you are looking at, it’s what you see" (Thoreau).

Discovering texts and images which appear to be non-poetic but which are loaded with poetic potential is a tremendous way of honing critical faculties.

Using ‘found’ material, varying types of form can be applied in order to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. In general, form and content have a symbiotic relationship, the latter often determining the former. Form can range from a simple shopping list to a Shakespearean Sonnet. Making the form choice ensures that the work has structure and definition.

In its purest form, found poetry is poetry assembled from non-literary sources—can labels, road signs, clothing tags, picture titles, advertisements, etc. At some point it became acceptable to lift an entire section of text and arrange it using poetic devices. All of the text had to be used, nothing could be deleted and nothing could be added.

Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.

A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.

Examples of found poems can be seen in the work of Blaise Cendrars, David Antin, and Charles Reznikoff. In his book Testimony, Reznikoff created poetry from law reports.

Many poets have also chosen to incorporate snippets of found texts into larger poems, most significantly Ezra Pound. His Cantos includes letters written by presidents and popes, as well as an array of official documents from governments and banks. The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, uses many different texts, including Wagnerian opera, Shakespearian theater, and Greek mythology. Other poets who combined found elements with their poetry are William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Louis Zukofsky.

The found poem achieved prominence in the twentieth-century, sharing many traits with Pop Art, such as Andy Warhol's soup cans or Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheels and urinals. The writer Annie Dillard has said that turning a text into a poem doubles that poem's context. "The original meaning remains intact," she writes, "but now it swings between two poles."

Found poetry is the literary equivalent version of collage. Much like the visual artist who combines multiple media (newspaper, feathers, coins, sheet music) into collage art, you can do the same with words, pulling concepts and phrasings from various sources to create “found” poems.

This is where your word artistry comes in. Start playing. You can cut out words or phrases that speak to you and start rearranging them until a thought or theme jumps out at you. You can start with a complete text and work backwards — start to erase words and sentences until something new emerges. You can start with, for example, the directions to something and change out words. Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of breaking up sentences in interesting ways.

Example - Passage from Novel

from Holes, by Louis Sachar

There was a change in the weather. For the worse. The air became unbearably humid. Stanley was drenched in sweat. Beads of moisture ran down the handle of his shovel. It was almost as if the temperature had gotten so hot that the air itself was sweating. A loud boom of thunder echoed across the empty lake. A storm was way off to the west, beyond the mountains. Stanley could count more than thirty seconds between how far away the storm was. Sound travels a great distance across a barren wasteland.

Found Poem

Holes

There was a change

For the worse.

The air became humid

Beads of moisture ran down

The handle of his shovel

It was almost as if

The air itself was sweating

Thunder echoed across the empty lake

A storm beyond the mountains.

Thirty seconds between the flash

And the thunder

Sound travels a great distance

Across a barren wasteland

How to write a Found Poem

A found poem uses language from non-poetic contexts and turns it into poetry. Think of a collage - visual artists take scraps of newspaper, cloth, feathers, bottle caps, and create magic. You can do the same with language and poems.

Writing this type of poetry is a kind of treasure hunt. Search for interesting scraps of language, then put them together in different ways and see what comes out. Putting seemingly unrelated things together can create a kind of chemical spark, leading to surprising results.

You might end up rewriting the poem in the end and taking all the found language out, or you might keep the found scraps of language almost in their original form. Either way, found language is a great way to jolt your imagination.

There are no rules for found poetry, as long as you are careful to respect copyright.

Here are some potential sources of "treasure":

instruction books

recipes

horoscopes

fortune cookies

bulletin boards

science, math, or social science textbooks

dictionaries

graffiti

pieces of letters, post cards, phone messages, notes you've written for yourself

grocery lists, lists of all kinds

Here are some ideas you can use to write your own found poetry:

1) Take parts of instructions for some appliance such as a microwave. Replace some of the words that refer to the appliance, using that words that talk about something else. For example: "Lift the memory carefully. Caution: edges may be sharp..."

2) Try writing a love poem that quotes graffiti you have seen somewhere, or one that quotes personal ads in a newspaper. This could be very sad love poem, or a funny one, depending on how you decide to write it.

3) Write a poem called "Possible Side Effects." Use phrases from the instructions for some medication in your house, and combine these with language from another source, such as newspaper headlines, advertisements, a TV guide, or a mail-order catalogue. Put these two very different elements together and see what happens.

Pulitzer Prize winning author, Annie Dillard, published a book of found poems—Mornings Like This, and she changed the rules. She lifted lines of text from various books (one book per poem), discarded the original intent, arranged the lines into a poem. Dillard dropped words from the text. She did not add any words of her own, except for the title. She always credited the source.

There are a couple of ways to write a found poem. Pick up a book, find a line you like, write it down—find the second line—create the poem as you go. This works well for free verse or haiku. If you are creating a form poem, such as a villanelle, sestina, cinquain, etc., you will need to gather lines you like and then see if you can arrange them to fit the chosen form. Rhyme is difficult but it can be done.

Writing found poetry can help you grow as a poet. You'll see new word relationships, new ways of developing thoughts. You'll put lines together that you may have never thought of yourself. You will hear sounds and you'll find fresh imagery. Some sources urge poets to start with "found" lines and then add to them. That is using "found" lines as a trigger. Adding your own words is not creating found poetry. Found poetry is all about being a good editor, having a good ear, learning how to "shape" a poem. It will push your poetry to another dimension as long as you are "crafting," not merely presenting a "list" of lines. Found poetry is not a poetry-generating machine. Good found poetry takes work.

Erasure is a form of found poetry or found art created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. The results can be allowed to stand in situ or they can be arranged into lines and/or stanzas.

"Radi Os" - Ronald Johnson's "Radi Os" is a long poem deconstructed from the text of Milton's "Paradise Lost".

A Humument - Tom Phillips' A Humument is a major work of book art and found poetry deconstructed from a Victorian novel.

Mans Wows - Jesse Glass' Mans Wows (1981), is a series of poems and performance pieces mined from John George Hohman's book of charms and healings Pow Wows, or The Long Lost Friend.

Nets - Jen Bervin's Nets is an erasure of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Hope Tree - Frank Montesonti's Hope Tree is a book of erasure poems based on R. Sanford Martin's How to Prune Fruit Trees.

The O Mission Repo - Travis Macdonald's The O Mission Repo treats each chapter of The 9/11 Commission Report with a different method of poetic erasure.

The ms of my kin - Janet Holmes's The ms of my kin (2009) erases the poems of Emily Dickinson written in 1861-62, the first few years of the Civil War, to discuss the more contemporary Iraq War.

"Seven Testimonies (redacted)" - Nick Flynn's "Seven Testimonies (redacted)" in The Captain Asks a Show of Hands, is an erasure of the testimonies from prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Of Lamb - Matthea Harvey's Of Lamb is a book-length erasure of a biography of Charles Lamb.

Voyager - Srikanth Reddy's Voyager is another book-length erasure, of Kurt Waldheim's autobiography

Jonathan Safran Foer did a book-length erasure of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz which he entitled Tree of Codes. Schulz was killed by an officer of the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of his hometown Drohobycz, after distributing the bulk of his life's work to gentile friends immediately prior to the occupation. All of these manuscripts have been lost. Safran-Foer writes: “All that we have of his fiction are two slim collections, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under The Sign of the Hourglass. On the basis of these, Schulz is considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Their long shadow--the work lost to history--is, in many ways, the story of the century." The Tree of Codes is Safran-Foer's attempt to represent the unrepresentable loss which occurred in the Holocaust by deleting text, rather than by writing another book about the Holocaust as a historical subject or context for a work of fiction. Safran-Foer's approach to the Holocaust as an "unrepresentable subject" recalls the use of negative space in the poetry of Dan Pagis.

Jenny Holzer's Redaction Paintings may be considered a work of erasure.

In Detained, Holzer exhibits new works including a series of paintings and a large LED configuration. Each painting depicts a handprint of an American soldier accused of crimes in Iraq, including detainee abuse and assault. Culled from documents made public through the Freedom of Information Act, Holzer’s hangs the hands of the charged next to those of the wrongly accused and those whose culpability has been lost, representing the fog of war. Her LED artwork, Torso, displays in red, blue, white, and purple light the statements, investigation reports, and emails from the case files of the accused soldiers. The installation lays bare that it is the individual who suffers and confronts the mechanics of politics and war. Detained makes substantial Wislawa Szymborska’s lament and statement in her poem “Tortures” that “the body is and is and is and has nowhere to go.”

The work consists of enlarged, colorized silkscreen "paintings" of declassified and oftentimes heavily censored American military and intelligence documents that have recently been made available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act. Beautiful in their own right, the works are also haunting reminders of what really goes on behind the scenes in the American military/political power system. Documents address counter-terrorism, prisoner abuse, and even the threat of Osama Bin Laden. Some of the documents are almost completely inked out, like Colin Powell's memo on Defense Intelligence Agency reorganisation.

Anthropologist Michael Powell writes: "While the literal act of redaction attempts to extract information and eradicate meaning, the black marker actually transforms the way we read these documents, sparking curiosity and often stirring skeptical, critical, and even cynical readings. As redacted government documents make their way from government bureaus into the hands of citizens, a peculiar transformation seems to take place, one that seems to create a paranoia within reason.

Erasure in Philosophy

Heidegger practiced erasure as a way to define nihilism (in an indefinite sort of way). In a 1956 letter to Ernst Jünger, Heidegger wrote the term Being, then crossed it out: “Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since the word is necessary, it remains legible.” Here erasure, or what philosophers call sous rature (“under erasure”), illustrates the problematic existence of presence and the absence of meaning.

Write a Found Poem

Carefully re-read the prose text you have chosen, and look for 50–100 words that stand out in the prose passage. Highlight or underline details, words and phrases that you find particularly powerful, moving, or interesting. Note especially examples that reflect your loving feelings or loving feelings of the subject of the prose text.

On a separate sheet of paper, make a list of the details, words and phrases you underlined, keeping them in the order that you found them. Double space between lines so that the lines are easy to work with. Feel free to add others that you notice as you go through the prose piece again.

Look back over your list and cut out everything that is dull, or unnecessary, or that just doesn’t seem right for a poem about love. Try to cut your original list in half.

As you look over the shortened list, think about the tone that the details and diction con- vey. The words should all relate to love, since you are creating a love poem. Make sure that you have words that communicate your emotions or those of the person in the prose text.

Make any minor changes necessary to create your poem. You can change punctuation and make little changes to the words to make them fit together (such as change the tenses, possessives, plurals, and capitalizations).

When you’re close to an edited down version, if you absolutely need to add a word or two to make the poem flow more smoothly, to make sense, to make a point, you may add up to two words of your own. That’s two and only two!

Read back over your edited draft one more time and make any deletions or minor changes.

Check the words and choose a title.

Copy the words and phrases. Space or arrange the words so that they’re poem-like. Pay attention to line breaks, layout, and other elements that will emphasize important words or significant ideas in the poem.

Read aloud as you arrange the words! Test the possible line breaks by pausing slightly. If it sounds good, it’s probably right. Arrange the words so that they make a rhythm you like. You can space words out so that they are all alone or all run together. You can also put key words on lines by themselves.

Emphasize words by playing with bold face and italics, different sizes of letters, and so forth.

At the bottom of the poem, cite where the words in the poem came from.

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