Meg Freer
| Found poems are unique in that poets do not write them from scratch. Instead, they are discovered in other works and, one way or another, arranged into poetry. Canada’s John Robert Colombo traces the first found poem in English to Yeats, who, as editor of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), included a “versified” prose fragment from a Walter Pater essay. In his introduction to F.R. Scott’s 1967 collection of found poetry, Trouvailles: Poems from Prose, Louis Dudek described the form as “a piece of realistic literature, in which significance appears inherent in the object — either as extravagant absurdity or as unexpected worth.” As Scott’s “Pavilion Misrepresents Outlook” shows, found poetry can be an excellent platform for protest as well as for irony (saying one thing but meaning the opposite). Colombo, Scott, and Dorothy Livesay were the first Canadian poets to explore the possibilities of found poetry. The first two focused mainly on re-arranging existing texts with minimal intervention, while Livesay (and, later, others such as Michael Ondaatje and Daphne Marlatt) created what Franz Stanzel calls “documentary literature, employing historical or social documents a literature.” Since then, found poetry has gone in many directions and now includes everything from collage to erasure poetry. As Shane Rhodes points out, today we can “… conceptualize found poetry along an axis that ranges from non-interventionist at one extreme … to the other end where the found text is doctored, and ‘poeticized,’ and, perhaps, included within a larger unfound structure.” Representing one end of the spectrum, Scott’s poems are examples of the non- interventionist approach, where poems are created by inserting line breaks in otherwise unchanged passages from a larger text. Brian Bartlett’s “What He Chose to Record,” part of a sequence of found poems, is a documentary/collage, which gathers together fragments from a variety of East Coast historical sources, including diaries, letters newspapers, and books. “The art of writing these poems,” Bartlett explains, “is one of radical selection, concentration, and free rearrangement.” At the other end of the spectrum, Jordan Abel’s poem is an example of erasure poetry, which deletes passages from an original text — in this case, the book Totem Poles by anthropologist Maurice Barbeau. Abel also often leaves the retained words in the same position as on the original page, giving a kind of breathlessness and pause to the new text. M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Zong! #24” is another example of erasure poetry, but she combines hers with collage and documentary. For her book Zong!,s a long poem about the 1781 deaths of 150 Africans who’d been thrown overboard from a slave ship, she “locked” herself into a legal report about the incident, much as the slaves had been “locked” on the ship. She then “fractured and fragmented,” and “murdered” the text, “finding” her poems “in different places on the page,” and leaving large amounts of white space, “as if they need to breathe.” She later began to break down words to find other words. As she says, “I use the text of the legal report almost as a painter uses paint or a sculptor stone.” Another kind of found poem, the cento, has a very long history. J.A. Cuddon, in The Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, calls it a “collection of bits and pieces from various writers.” He quotes an early practitioner of the form, Decimus Magnus Ausonius (circa AD 310–90), who described the cento as a poem of hexameter lines created by a complex combination of full and/or half-lines borrowed from one poet or many. Modern centos tend to be — as poet Mary Dalton says — “collage pieces… woven together as a form of tribute,” that can make, “on one level, a little anthology.” Any number of approaches can be used to gather and piece together the borrowed lines. Here, Maureen Hynes uses sometimes single, sometimes multiple lines from twenty- four poems by eighteen poets to create hers. |
Note: Erasure poem based on Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve, eds., In Fine Form: A
Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry, 2 nd ed. (Caitlin Press, 2016), “Found Poetry,”
introduction, pp. 52-53. Highlight poem for context.
Click here to read more of the current issue!
Click here to read last month’s issue, featuring Faye Brinsmead!
Click here to view links to every issue, searchable by month and author!