Over the past century or so, since found poetry has been a ‘thing’, texts have been sourced largely from printed matter in all its diversity, from an auctioneer’s catalogue (Thomas A Clark) to Fishing News (Ian Hamilton Finlay) to a Victorian novel (Tom Philips) advertisements (Kurt Schwitters) law reports (Charles Reznikoff) newspaper clippings (Charles Olson) and almost everything else (Ezra Pound).
I’m drawn to this kind of work because it offers a means of circumventing the selective process, of sidestepping what John Cage called the constraints of “memory, taste, likes and dislikes”. Annie Dillard has called it “editing at its extreme”, creating poems from bits of broken text. Words may be dropped, but not added; themes and orders are the poet’s own.
In this blogpost I’m looking at the further opportunities and alternative techniques suggested by online text, some of which are flagged up and sampled here.
This first is very much along ‘traditional’ lines, in that it is the fortuitous finding online of a block of text easily adapted to regular stanza form, with its original entire wrongness intact:
From the noticeboard of the Associate Professor in English Literature
On the day I introduced the mandala project,
I explained the following found poem assignment
that students would complete outside of class.
I first showed students examples of the work of
Philip Larkin, a poet who creates visual found poems
from the pages of rare books of Victorian prose.
We discussed how Larkin constructed his poems
by culling provocative words, eliminating all the rest,
and uniting the selected words into coherent compositions
through the use of space, shape, and word order.
I told students I wanted them to follow a similar process
using markers and a single page of Frederick Douglass’s prose
from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
for their Pedagogical Recycling Found Poetry Assignment.
Online translators allow a text to be translated into almost any other language, and then back into the poet’s first language, either directly or via a route of further translations through other languages. These are some examples of simple back-and-forth translations of a line from Wordsworth:
Showing fairly with the earth there is no at all. Japanese
The ground has to not show – no matter what – more honestly. Dutch
To endurance correction being visible grandly anything boat song it is not. Korean
Mass does not have nothing to represent honestly. German
Earth no demonstration fairly. Traditional Chinese
There’s some useful stuff going on here: the wayward vocabulary in the Korean, the misplaced logic of the Dutch and German, the zingy concision of the Chinese. But that was in 2006. I went back to this recently and most of the direct translations were along the lines of “The earth has nothing better to show”, suggesting that the moment has passed, as automatic translators have found (or perhaps lost) their mojo, and it may be hard graft to better the disappointing result of a less elegant way of saying the same thing.
I was pleased to get some use of Amazon which didn’t involve the moral dilemma of buying something more cheaply or supporting a local or specialist trader. This was yielded (freely) from an Amazon search:
Tuesday October 30th
Wake up with Whoopi
Bathe with Jesus
Getting Dressed with Dignity
Breakfast with bin Laden
Commuting with Tax Credits
Meetings with Remarkable Men
Coffee with Conscience
Working with Emotional Intelligence
Lunch with an Astronaut
An Afternoon with Anxiety Disorder
Tea with Mr Rochester
Train with the Royal Marines
A Drink with Shane MacGowan
Dancing with Mathematics
Going Home with Elvis
Supper with the Crippens
Sleeping with Cannibals
Dreaming with Patricia Garfield PhD
Similarly, there are ways of using Google searches creatively. For example, I have tried searching for stock expressions and collating their new contexts, such as:
The first thing you should do is somewhat obvious
The first thing you should do is take a deep breath
The first thing you should do is put on some oven gloves
The first thing you should do is to place your napkin in your lap
The first thing you should do is let go of any guilt you may be feeling, and encourage your mother to do the same
The first thing you should do is change all the locks
Likewise, a search for the attribution of a well-known maxim threw up plenty of alternatives, which I simply cut and pasted, and put into order:
Attribution
Good artists borrow, great artists steal – Pablo Picasso
A good writer borrows, a great writer steals! – 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
Recently I’ve been trying to use the predictive text function on a smartphone for found poetry. There are real problems with this. For one, the system “learns” to predict from the individual user’s texting history, and mine isn’t rich enough to yield useful results. It keeps coming back to the words “boiler” and “glideth”. Also, the nature of predictive texting is to revert to cliché, which tends to work counter to what one wants. I’ve been trying it again with lines from Wordsworth, but it doesn’t seem to have got the idea:
I was up at the beach
I wandered around like a dog
I wandered lonely without a fight
I wandered lonely as a result
That was interpolating one word from the original at a time and then following predictive suggestions. This was a little better, using the original initial letters:
I want London as a clown
I want love as a class
I was like an angel cake
If anyone has results they’d care to share, I’d be interested to hear. Please DM me on twitter @JohnBevis8
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Some of these texts appear in my collection Some Alternatives to Flock, Coracle, 2008