How many found poems are there? In theory, an infinite number. The origin story of the found poem reverses the process of Christopher Logue’s ‘London Airport’ (1974):
Last night in London Airport
I saw a wooden bin
labelled UNWANTED LITERATURE
IS TO BE PLACED HEREIN.
So I wrote a poem
and popped it in.
Found poems are recycled literature. I think I only included one found poem in The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018), Laurie Duggan’s ‘Hearts’ (1985), which ends:
Here, a poem is found in an abattoir notice composed with total indifference to the symbolic meaning of its subject — its only meaning is meat. Yet by the simple poetic addition of ‘Hearts’ as a title, it is made to pass comment on its own coldness. Unlike the traditional poet’s heart, with its tendency to spontaneous overflows, this text is ‘drained of excess moisture’, ‘packed flat’ in justified paragraphs. It may be ‘in order to cut one heart’, but no cutting is performed: the prose stays prose.
In its own way, Duggan’s poem is as perfect a ready-made as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. But how many other found poems exist in this hands-off form? An anthology I found, Losers Weepers: Poems Found Practically Everywhere (1969), ed. by George Hitchcock, takes it as read that ‘the Finders have cut up and rearranged their found objects to suit their own tastes’.
And this principle, of course — of judicious intervention, cutting to obtain the exact weight — leads to all kinds of remix poetics, from centos of remembered lines to the erased pages of a whole book. But as Mary Ruefle, a practitioner of the latter, has said:
I certainly didn’t ‘find’ any of these pages. I made them in my head, just as I do my other work.
Modern poems may contain a large admixture of found material. I’ve always assumed that the line from The Waste Land (1922) which has been going through my head this week — ‘Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aust Litauen, echt deutsch’ (‘I’m no Russian, come from Lithuania, genuinely German’) — was ‘found’ by Eliot in overheard speech, which he remembered for its dramatic, tricolon compression of the anxiety of belonging to a newly-independent state between Russia and Europe after the Great War.
But how many found poems have been taken directly from life without cutting or mixing? It’s an anthology I’d like to read, though it might be a small one.