An Introduction to Found Poems

To make a found poem you take words that were originally intended for one, usually functional, purpose -- as in advertising copy or newspaper articles, where text and image aim to persuade the public of a product's merits, or inform the reader of events that took place-- and you invest them with a different, aesthetic one. The words, viewed on their own in this new way, take on added power, something like a metaphorical resonance.  A kind of found poem, though not the only kind, consists of a prose fragment lifted from such an ad or article and set down on a blank page, in, say, a literary magazine, where the way it is read is changed by its new context.  Such poems originate in Duchamp's suggestion that an alternate to creating art is to simply see it, and they correspond to his readymade sculptures. (To take something  “out of context” is an accusation made against journalists criticized for distorting the “truth;” ironically, it is just such distortion that is employed in found poetry --taking words out of their original context and situating them in an aesthetic one--in order to reveal “poetic truth.”)

The essence of what a poet does is to take an experience of reality and transcribe it into language. Using the craft at her or his disposal, the poet then distills the language and gives it shape, pattern, rhythm.... Found poetry is a way of making poems that differs from other poems in that the first step has already been done. Someone else has put reality into language. The poet appropriates it for purposes as poetry, which are dramatically different from what was originally intended, and then works her or his craft upon it in ways indistinguishable from any other poem. Bearing in mind that its language doesn’t originate with but is borrowed by the poet/author, anything that can be said about making poems in general also applies to found poems. Their range is as broad and various as any other kind of poem.

Making found poems is, in a certain sense, a throwback to an old view of the writing process, in which the creative part, the actual writing, was seen to come first, followed by the editing and polishing stage. In education circles, the writing process is now viewed as a continuous shuttling back and forth between these two stages. This separation of the generative and crafting functions that go into making a work of art is not, however, unique to writing. There is “sampling” in music; “collage,” “appropriation,” and  “assemblage” in the visual and plastic arts. Perhaps the most exact parallel occurs in film, where the director, in collaboration with the screenwriter and supporting crew, produces raw film footage, which the film editor, who had nothing to do with its generation, then crafts into a final artifact.

In order to make poems, found poems in particular, you must be in a state of heightened sensitivity to language in all its forms or manifestations:  spoken, written, printed or electronically broadcast. “When one is highly alert to language, then nearly everything begs to be in a poem,” James Tate wrote (introduction to "The Best American Poetry, 1997”):

“words overheard on a subway or in a supermarket, graffiti, newspaper headlines, a child's school lesson blowing down the street. This is the most exciting state to be in.  Commonplace words are suddenly mysterious and beautiful. Someone uses a phrase ‘baby farm,’ and your head spins with delight. ‘Savoy cabbage,’ ‘fine-tooth comb,’ ‘patrol wagon,’ it doesn't matter how mundane when the poet, almost beyond his or her control, is seeking language, questioning it, testing it. The poet will take that commonplace piece of language and ‘make it new.’"

Another requirement is that you possess, as James Schuyler states in, "The Morning of the Poem,"

“...a sense of
How the thing said
Is in the words, how
The words are themselves
The thing said.  "

These are necessary conditions, but not sufficient. You must also have something to say, something which draws upon your emotions, intellect, perceptions, experiences, sensations, etc. And, finally, it has to be something that can only be said as poetry.

“Writing a poem is like making an artifact.” Galway Kinnell has said. “Its is making something physical out of words.” His statement comes in a direct line from William Carlos Williams who once defined a poem as: “...a machine made of words;” and who went on to state, “...it’s not what [the poet] says that counts as a work of art, but what he makes with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.” The conception of poet as maker and of poems as hand-crafted objects or mechanisms, each with internal workings uniquely engineered to suit its purpose, has an almost literal meaning when it comes to found poems. In their composition you feel the language as made up of concrete entities, things--words, phrases, sentences--to be manipulated, that is, to be moved about on the page (or computer screen).

Just any piece of appropriated text will not do, however. The words must embody a dual significance: saying one thing, while also saying something altogether different; a quality of double meaning that is frequently, but not exclusively, ironic in nature, and has much in common with punning. Framing the words with white space on a blank page creates a new thought for the selected passage, one that is inextricable from the original.  Reading the poem, one experiences a kind of trick of mind: one meaning moves to the fore, the other to the back, and then vice versa, in a way that is analogous to the working of the novelty plastic “wiggle cards” that were popular in the ’50s and ’60s, in which the imprinted image of a person would change clothes, swing a bat, or otherwise move as you tilted the card to catch light at a slightly different angle, and then, given another tilt, would revert to its initial posture. Certain road signs exhibit this quality of found poetry:

SLOW
CHILDREN
CROSSING

The answer to what makes a found poem a poem is the same as for the question, what makes a free verse poem a poem, as for what makes a prose poem a poem. “It’s vision that counts,” is the way David Ignatow once put it. “Anything that’s held together by an insight, around which everything gathers and goes towards and helps build--that is a poem.”

It has become a commonplace exercise in creative writing classes to take Williams' poem, "The Red Wheel Barrow," and put it into sentences as demonstration of the function of the line-break in making a poem that says something different from prose.  The reverse procedure, however, taking at random just any prose text and breaking it into lines, doesn't guarantee that the outcome will be a poem. The essential, missing ingredient is poetic insight.  The recognition of "things that can only be said as poetry," must come first. "The meaning of a poem," George Oppen said, "is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.  The meaning of many lines will be changed ... if one changes the line ending.... The line-break is just as much a part of the language as the period, comma or parenthesis, and it shows that there are things that can only be said as poetry."

Kinds of Found Poems

Found poems can be roughly sorted into three categories: “pure,” “impure,” and “Dada.” “Pure” found poems reproduce the original source verbatim; “impure” ones involve a reworking of the original. John Robert Columbo, in the introduction to his selection of found work included in the anthology Open Poetry, (Gross, Quasha; Simon and Schuster, 1973) designates the “impure” variety as “assisted” found poems, because practitioners of his acquaintance referred to their reworking the original material as “assisting” it to become a poem. Duchamp’s term for this kind of found art was “rectified.” In 1916 or 1917 he made a collage titled “Girl with Bedstead,” using cut up photographs, which he pasted on canvas and then drew on with pencil and crayon. He called it a “rectified readymade.” So the tradition of altering found materials to construct a work of art is nearly a century old, already “ancient” in this sped-up century of rapid technological change. Hans Arp, another pioneer of found/chance creations, likewise modified his materials. He would tear up pieces of colored or painted paper and drop them on the floor, where the pattern they formed became the inspiration for his work, which resulted from alterations and enhancements he made to the pattern. And Blais Cendrars’ travelogue sequence of verbal “snapshots,” Kodak (circa 1920),is made up of passages he lifted and then rectified, from the pulp novel The Mysterious Doctor Cornelius, written by his contemporary Gustav Le Rouge.

(The Cento-- Latin for “patchwork”-- a poetic form practiced since Greek and Roman times, is, another kind of found poem consisting of lines of poetry appropriated from different poets, past or present, and stitched together to say something new. This cut-up technique was given a post-modern twist by Ted Berrigan in his Sonnets. It can also be seen in its classical form in “To a Waterfowl” and "The Dong with the Luminous Nose," both by John Ashbery; and in Peter Gizzi's "Ode: Salute to the New York School.")

Dada poems are different in kind from the other found poems. They consist of scraps of appropriated language--words, phrases, sentences-- strung together according to chance operations. There is no intentional shaping of the components by the poet to coalesce around an insight or building toward a vision. This difference is illustrated by contrasting David Ignatow’s description of the process involved in making a found poem with Tristan Tzara’s recipe for a Dada poem.

Ignatow: “...the poet takes a word, a sentence, a whole paragraph from magazines, books, newspapers and advertising matter, without discernible relationship among them, and puts them together on a single page according to his or her insight into them as a group.   Altogether, they say something different to us from their original purpose in print.  It is a poet discovering possibilities for the sake of possibility.  In other words, he is exercising his poetic talent for metaphor, relating the unrelated in unexpected, illuminating ways.”

Tzara: “Take a newspaper. Take a pair of scissors. Select an article as long as you want your poem to be. Cut out the article. Then carefully cut out each of the words that form this article and put them in a bag. Shake gently. Then take out each scrap, one after the other. Conscientiously copy them in the order they left the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are, an infinitely original writer, with a charming sensibility, beyond the understanding of the vulgar.”

           Tristan Tzara intended to undermine cherished notions of craftsmanship and originality, to assault the sanctity of Poet and Poetry, whereas Ignatow emphasizes original insight and craftsmanship.

Newspaper Poems

“Newspaper poems” is the term I use to describe found poems made from appropriated newspaper texts. As a category, they cut across the different types of found poems: pure, impure or assisted, and Dada cut-ups. What is special about them is that they start with public material: utterance or event that has been recorded in newsprint, which the poet then subjectively operates on before s/he sends its back out into the public realm to be read in a form that has been modified, shaped, given significance. In this sense you can say that found poems originated from newspaper material exist at the permeable boundary between the public and private.         

“Testimony,” Charles Reznikoff’s two-volume masterpiece of found poems (which happens to be drawn from late 19th century American legal proceedings, however, not newspapers), is a fitting description for many newspaper poems. When not quoting the speech of politicians or government officials, newspaper poems typically quote private citizens or victims who have given testimony about tragedy, violence, death, war.... The principal thing that distinguishes the found poem from the newspaper account is that the poem extracts the testimony from its surrounding text, baring it of context, which is left largely to the reader to supply. In doing this, the poem doubles the resonance of the quoted words, heightening their meaningfulness to a metaphorical plane.

Newspaper prose is characterized by a standard syntax and rhythm. Simple sentences are the norm; paragraphs often consist of single sentences. What makes the news news is put up front in the story or article. The punch line is abstracted into a pithy headline and reiterated in the lead sentence or paragraph. Details follow after that, fleshing out the context.  Operating on newspaper material to make poems, one has to shape the language differently because one’s intentions are altogether different. The poet distills the language to an essence. Details that provide context are frequently discarded; only those that contribute to framing the emotionally resonant statement are included. Instead of giving away the point or punch line at the start, as the news article does, the poem builds up to it forcefully at the end. Paring down the language and adding line-breaks, the poet alters the news writer’s syntax and rhythm and creates in their place a new tone, new rhythms.

Most importantly, the poet establishes a point of view or stance toward what is being selected, quoted. The way this is done conveys the poet’s attitude toward the selected text and functions as an indirect statement about what she or he has chosen to quote. It has the effect of underlining, or pointing a finger to draw attention. It’s the poet saying, implicitly, “This is what I feel about what so-and-so, whom I’m quoting, has said.”  It is the poet’s point of view that supplies the poem’s emotional charge. Reznikoff liked to quote an 11th century Chinese poet, who said: "Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling.  It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling." In found poetry, the quoted text is ‘the thing,’ the slant given to its presentation coveys the feeling.

An Example

The following found poem is an example of what I mean by a “newspaper poem.” It is taken entirely from printed accounts that appeared at the time of the discovery of Dr. Josef Mengele’s remains in Brazil. Mengele was one of several notorious Nazi war criminals who fled Germany at the conclusion of World War II and eventually found refuge, living under an assumed name in South America. Warrants were issued by the Nuremburg Tribunal for his arrest and both German and Israeli authorities as well as private investigators hunted him but he eluded capture for almost forty years. It turned out that he had drowned in 1979, suffering a heart attach while swimming. Following a lead, German police discovered his grave in Brazil and unearthed his remains in 1985. Forensic evidence confirmed that they were indeed Mengele’s. This made front-page news

Among the articles that appeared in papers at this time, several included interviews with Auschwitz survivors who had personal experience of “The Angel of Death,” including several twins whom he had tortured in his “experiments.” I recall being deeply moved when I read one of these accounts. I picked up a pen and then reread it marking passages. These I copied out, altering their order to suit my purpose in making a poem that reflected my feeling of shock and horror. I intentionally did nothing to inflate the language, keeping it factual and unaccented as in the newspaper reporter’s actual account. The details and images seemed to me all the more powerful for being understated.

Like Butterflies* By Mark Pawlak

The Auschwitz “Angel of Death,” Josef Mengele,
would meet the trains delivering Jews to the camp
and select out from those destined for the gas
healthy pairs of twins. These he kept alive
in crowded cages for genetic experiments
to aid him in building a master race.
He gave them chemical injections
which made many nauseous and faint, and a few
became numb when the needles were put into their spines.
Some were given transfusions of blood
from one twin to another,
or he removed parts of their sexual organs;
yet others he sterilized by radiation.
He was especially interested in the colors of eyes.
If he noticed that twins’ eyes were brown
but their mother’s eyes were blue,
he might keep her alive in the cage with her children.
He would try to change their eye color
with injections of dye or with drops administered daily
that burned the eyes like acid,
and he would take blood samples from these subjects
several times each day.
One twin said she was stupefied
when ushered into Mengele’s private laboratory.
There she saw an entire wall of eyes looking back at her,
human eyes of every color
mounted on the wall like butterflies.

(*This poem was included in my collection Special Handling: Newspaper Poems New and Selected. It has subsequently been reprinted in three of anthologies of writing about the Holocaust and in The Holocaust Series, Book X by Carol Rosen, a limited edition non-traditional artist’s book in which every page is a hand-produced, original, photo/transparency, overlaying poem and photo.)