Anything You Pick Could Be Poetry

Joan Retallack's poem, Polities &/or Sonnets, like most poems in its genre of found poetry, was in a sense ready-made. Its juxtapositions of strange concepts and syntactically similar yet competing phrases, like "a biography of ordinary man &/or the feminine subject &/or general theory of victims &/or intellectuals and power &/or the insurrection of the victim &/or classification struggles," were in fact, according to the poet, the titles of books in a catalogue from Polity Press. 

She wrote in an article for the Academy of American Poets that it had inspired her because "There was something oddly, delightfully, playful about all those declarative phrases promising so much, so baldly competing with one another. I decided to compose an experiment, that turned out to be the 14 line spates of repartee among selected titles." However, Polities &/or Sonnets can be read as a satire of the publishing industry and its preoccupations, an experiment with structure and form, or as an example of a shift in our understanding of what is and what is not poetry. 

Found poetry is essentially poetry that is put together from lines or sequences that the poet comes across or finds rhythm and imagery in - poems have been made from legal testimony, graffiti or even speeches by politicians and baseball commentators. However, it also comes as a profound shift in the nature of what we consider poetry, and who is qualified to write it, as any words, whether spoken or written, can be turned into poetry by anyone who finds some sort of rhythm in them. Thus, poetry is not confined to lofty subjects and ideals, or to the works of people deemed qualified to write poetry. 

For example, William Wordsworth, despite arguing that poetry should be made of the words and concerns of common people, also said that a poet needed to be specially qualified "with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind." Found poetry subverts this notion by proving that anything, when fitted into the aesthetic framework that we have come to associate with a poem, can indeed be turned into poetry, regardless of who created it. 

In this sense, it has philosophical similarities to the Readymade series of artworks by the Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, which consisted of commonly available, manufactured objects that were turned into art by placing them in situations like galleries and installations, which were traditionally associated with artistic output. This series, which Duchamp called "the most important single idea to come out of my work," expressed the still-provocative idea that aesthetic notions about art are quite absurd, as no art is the product of an extraordinary genius or creator, or set apart from other objects merely by the manner in which it was created. Thus Andre Bréton and Paul Éluard's Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme defined a Readymade, in an entry probably written by Duchamp himself, as "an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist."

Some accounts also suggest that many of Duchamp's Readymades, such as the famous Fountain, came from the ideas of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who would also pick up rubbish from the New York gutters that, according to a contemporary, "to her tortured yet highly sensitised perception, became objects of formal beauty."

This is a similar process to that of found poetry, of choosing to find aesthetic value in ordinary objects and words. While poetry generated by bots has the similar quality of being formed by picking up phrases from a large corpus of words, it lacks this element of intention and choice that gives a found poem its meaning, or as Bréton and Èluard put it, its dignity. To quote the writer Annie Dillard, turning a text into a found poem doubles that poem's context. "The original meaning remains intact," she writes, "but now it swings between two poles."

This dual nature of a found poem has attracted many writers. Several Modernists, like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, used lines from other works, even within an original piece, to evoke various moods and contexts. Others wrote poems that were almost completely based on found phrases, like the Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff, whose book Testimony came from the words of court witnesses, which Reznikoff believed encapsulated the state of society and crime in America. However, some found poetry is purely accidental. 

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defense during the Iraq War, whose controversial use of torture and extraordinary rendition made him extremely unpopular in America, was the subject of an article in Slate that turned his prevarications into found poetry. "His work, with its dedication to the fractured rhythms of the plainspoken vernacular, is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’. Some readers may find that Rumsfeld’s gift for offhand, quotidian pronouncements is as entrancing as Frank O’Hara’s," wrote Hart Seely in the article.

The article turned into poetry even Rumsfeld’s controversial 'there are known knowns' speech of February 2002, in which he dithered about the lack of evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq, and the Al-Qaeda. This raises another question about found poetry: when we find poetic structure or rhyme in words that are meant to mislead or to justify wrongdoing, is it ethical to give it a new meaning or context through found poetry, and can we do so without trivialising?

However, this also harks back to Duchamp's understanding of the inherent absurdity of the artist's role. Perhaps the only way of subverting the inherent lie in such statements and justifications, is to partially sever it from its original context and give it a new meaning in poetic form, thereby highlighting the absurdity of the first use from which it was ready-made, whether this was an advertising catalogue or a politician's speech. In this way, found poems become part of a poetry of reuse, a subversive form of poetry that could help make sense of the contradictions and elisions inherent in much of modern language. 

Image credits: By Marcel Duchamp - NPR arthistory.about.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74693078