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Poetry Prompt 20 – Found Poetry Let's Create some Found Poems! When I was a young man I once attended a poetry reading in the basement of a Tokyo dance club called "Blue." Blue was sleek and modern, on the gradient scale of glass, stainless steel, and cool-colored illumination. Its sister club, Yellow, was warm and cozy, but both were themed on Alice Through the Looking Glass. Next to Blue's light court with the up-lit stand of bamboo was a large reception space, and this is where I heard a Canadian poet read from her newly published volume. She had gone through stacks of vintage same-sex porn magazines, cobbling together salacious 10-syllable lines of text in sets of 12, and then concluding her Found Sonnets with a couplet borrowed from one of Shakespeare's W. H. poems. The effect made me laugh. I got nasty, uncomfortable stares – glares, really – from the poetry-reading crowd, but later the poet herself found me and said: "You're the only one who got it. I was pretty uncomfortable reading here. Everyone took it so seriously!" So what is a Found Poem? It is a modernist take on forcing a deconstructivist's eye to an existing text. It is cut up and reassembled to suit the higher emotional goals of the poet; in other words, it's a collage. The history of this type of verse goes back a long way. Walt Whitman built a memorable poem around a recurring line and theme he found in a novel by Herman Melville. The poet wrote: O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead. O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead. My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult O shores, and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead. This is based on Melville's: "Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck's – wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, paternal old age! Away! let us away! – this instant let me alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket."[1] Few people know Whitman's poem about the murder of President Lincoln is grounded on a found item from Moby-Dick. Later poets who used found technique are Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. In the same way that Whitman left his Lincoln poem unacknowledged to his source material, Pound began his Cantos in the middle of an un-credited translation of Homer: And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward Bore us out with bellying canvas, Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess The poet paid eight dollars to have his first volume of poems self-published in an edition of one hundred, and his first reviewer had this to say: "French phrases and scraps of Latin and Greek punctuate his poetry.... He affects obscurity and loves the abstruse."[2] As for Eliot, William Packard writes eloquently about his found poetry technique. "T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land drew on mythology and anthropology, which he interwove with colloquial voices of twentieth-century women in London who were all frustrated and out of touch with their own fertility."[3] In contemporary understanding, Found Poetry maintains a few rules to adhere to. Namely, that sections of text should be lifted verbatim – usually only on a line-by-line basis – from the source material; only the most minimal editing is allowed to achieve the artistic goals of the poet; the resulting work should follow the 'old' standard and be a unified whole made up of lines and images that flow and work together (which naturally can be achieved through contrast as well); and finally, a single piece of writing is usually the object used for deconstruction. The prompt: write three Found Poems on the themes of 'Loss,' 'Memory,' and 'Celebration.' Your source material is The Dead, by James Joyce. You may decide if you wish to explore metre in your poem or not, or rhymes to accent certain parts. You may also wish to consider using a repeating section as a refrain. Let your imagination run free, as long as you allow the three principal themes to guide your creation of three freestanding works. -------------------------------------------- [1] From chapter 132, The Symphony, Moby-Dick, New York 1851 [2] See: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/ezra-pound [3] P. 107, The Art of Poetry Writing, New York 1992