| Found
Poems and Free Verse by Marcus Bales
| Found Poem: a
poem consisting of words found in a
non-poetic context (such as a product label,
conversation on a bus, physics textbook) and
usually broken into lines that convey a verse
rhythm. Both the term and the concept are
modeled on the objet trouvé, an artifact not
created as art or a natural object that is
held to have aesthetic value when taken out
of its context.- Encyclopedia
Britannica |
Everybody,
it often seems, or almost everybody, wants to be a
poet - at least almost every writer. They think being
known as a poet has a clear value, or they’d
call themselves journal-writers, or diarists, or
something else more descriptive of what they do. They
write free verse because it is easy to make and easy
to pass along. The virtues it claims are prose
virtues; and those who write it not only disdain but
disparage poetic virtues. There is, in fact, less to
writing free verse than there is to writing prose: in
prose you at least are expected to make sense,
expected to have some obligation to try to bring
something of significance, or importance, or both, to
the reader.
Some people argue that it’s not that easy. Their
claims run from that poetry is not a matter of how a
thing is said, but of what is said, through saying
poetry is built on the line- or flow-break, through
claims that we know it when we see it, through claims
not to write poetry at all but only to produce texts,
through claims that delineated prose is an original
"found poem", through claims that excising
words from existing poems creates an original
"poem of erasure", through a variety of
combinations of these failed notions and
justifications, to that each poem has a natural or
organic meter.
This last is not a strong claim, only the strongest
offered. It fails because a piece of language art is
not "natural" in the least - it is
artifice, intended to play with and on the language,
and with and on the expectations of the native
language speakers of that language. A piece of
language art hasn’t got a "natural"
meter - it is either given one by the artist, or such
a meter cannot exist. The only way meter can be
explained is that it’s a piece of artifice, an
artificial imposing of an expectation on that which,
in nature, in its natural state, hasn’t been
artificially imposed-on. This defense of free verse
fails as the most twisty bit of special pleading
I’ve read since Aquinas.
Poetry inheres in the presentation of the matter to a
reader capable of responding to both the presentation
and to the matter. Poetry is created by an agreement
between the reader and the writer: the writer demands
that the reader read the arranged words in a special
way - not special as in "Special Olympics",
but special as in of the matter being presented, and
at that matter itself. One must, in short, trust that
the poet isn't just wasting one's time and energy
with a trivial or otherwise inappropriate claim on
one's serious attention -- and it is a disappointment
to find that a poet has done so. Encounter that
disappointment often enough and the cry of
"Poetry!" gets as disregarded as the cry of
"Wolf!" in the fable.
And where does that leave "found poems"?
Can we legitimately cut any text up into what looks
like free verse and, by putting that metaphorical
border around it, claim original authorship of a
poem? What I have been doing to try to illustrate
that we cannot is to take various pieces I find on
the internet, in blogs, email, bulletin boards,
wherever, edit and re-lineate them into what looks
like free verse, title them "Found Poems",
and sign them, in order to call into question the
entire enterprise of "found poems" and
"free verse" - for if as George Simmers,
the editor of this magazine, put it in describing one
of the "found poems" I sent him:
| The virtues of this
piece were there, I guess, in the original -
unlike the sort of Found Poem that
foregrounds things the original writer was
not aware of. |
My
"found poem" pieces satirize both
"finding" poetry in texts and "free
verse" itself, since the definition of
"found poem" speaks of "a verse
rhythm" and free verse theoreticians’ best
defense of the existence of "free verse"
entails that free verse, too, has "a verse
rhythm". I hold that free verse has no
"verse rhythm", and that "found
poems" are theft, not writing, and mock both by
recasting prose lines into faux verse lines, and
calling them "found poems". My point is
that the virtues of the "found poem" are always
there in the original or there is nothing to
"find" in the first place! What is
"found" in "found poetry" is
nothing more than any good reader finds in any piece
of writing, and that "finding" doesn’t
justify trying to claim it as original work of the
finder’s own.
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