[apologies for any typos or grammatical errors. I just didn’t take the time to proofread this.]
A reader responded to my recent post Found Poem #2 requesting a bit more knowledge about my input to the poem and the process used to create it. From Wikipedia:
Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them (a literary equivalent of a collage[1]) by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. The resulting poem can be defined as treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the poem.
The concept of found poetry is closely connected to the revision of the concept of authorship, in the 20th century, (as John Hollander put it, “anyone may ‘find’ a text; the poet is he who names it, ‘Text'”).
I’m rejecting these commonly accepted definitions, or rather, I’m expanding the boundaries of the definition. In my most recent example, I used the paradigm of my trip from Raleigh, NC, to Seattle, WA, as an organizing theme. I let my mind wander with minimal focus from the beginning of the flight out of Raleigh through to the family celebration of life held the next day for my cousin. The day started with my morning dose of blood pressure and anti-inflammatory meds plus the recently-added Vitamin D to heal my broken arms. The first take starts the launch into what I’m calling a ‘found poem’.
pills once taken for entertainment
now do anything but, maintaining
dubious adherence to general
opinion.
Through the comma, I’m just starting yet another poetic rant about being old. But, because I’m keeping my mind open to whatever pops into it, my added clause appends an opinion which floats in my head all the time: we take pills based on faith in a medical opinion not a medical reality. [Quick take: high cholesterol doesn’t guarantee a heart attack or stroke. It’s simply been observed that people with higher cholesterol also have a higher correlation to suffering a heart event. It’s therefore quite plausible if you have higher cholesterol you’re more likely to have such an event. Ah, but wait. In order to be measured, these terms need to be defined. What is “high” cholesterol? For that matter, what is “cholesterol” mean when uttered in the context I just put it in? What’s high for me is different than what’s high for you, because as every doctor I’ve consulted will say, “we-e-e-ellllll everybody’s different.” Therefore we issue recommendations for use of drugs which get codified by medical protocols and insurance providers into hard-and-fast rules use terms which have a little bit of arbitrariness to them and which we know don’t apply equally to anybody. And don’t get me started on the more-common-than-you-might-think possibility of lab error.]
Back to poetry: now that a theme has suggested itself—remember, based off of using my consciousness only to observe what popped into my mind. I “see” a reaction in my head. Explaining this would take many posts, but the gist is that almost everything I write is an attempt to describe something I see in my head. It’s not an idea I’m trying to convey, although I’ve attempted this a few times during this #100poems thing. It’s an actual picture of something in the way only a mind kind see. In my fledgling poem I now suddenly see a swirling vapor of accepted opinion that circulates around Profound Truth somewhat in the way Plato said that thing about shadow’s in the cave and the reality that cast them there. I look then to the next thing on my journey that occurred within the context of the now-established theme except I’m still not forcing conscious manipulation on it.
Next, in the sequence of the journey is the schedule I’m trying to meet to get to my airport at just the right time, defined by me as getting through TSA with enough time to assemble my Stashed Stuff (that which one removes to not set off alarms), pee, and start the boarding process. It’s never perfect, but I’m searching for that sweet spot where I walk up to the podium at TSA, traverse the security gamut, put my belt on and re-populate my pockets, pee, and walk up just as my boarding group is requested to line up. Here my subconscious serves up another gem:
schedules provide
meaningless information to
entice us with false surety.
It occurs to me I’ve rarely started boarding exactly when the airline says it will start (to the minute), nor has the flight started at the time advertised more than 10% of the time. Hey, look, it’s another swirling piece of truth-vapor around Real Truth. Now the poem becomes easier. The next observation gets its frame of reference from how the experienced traveler becomes adept at moving through airport crowds, lines, and the overlapping PA announcements, all based on trying to move through St. Louis’s Lambert Airport. Moving through the automatic exit doors at Sea-Tac Airport prompted the next one, and the reflection on security in that one prompted me to jump backwards to an occurrence when I went through TSA back in Raleigh when I passed a tissue packet through the body scanner because he said something about metal and I thought, “hey it’s silver. Is it metallic?” (No, it wasn’t.)
I won’t belabor the rest of it. I let my mind wander to the next salient event, hitting the bar up at my hotel, then to the Uber driver I had. His silence I imputed to be from a lack of English and suddenly Fear Of ICE jumped into my brain. The memorial was held at a golf course, and I’ll admit, I molded this line consciously based on my love of the beauty of golf and the wastefulness of maintaining the courses in these days of dwindling water.
And suddenly I realized my mental walk through the trip had brought me to where I sat physically in my hotel room. For some reason, the necktie I’d used just minutes before to clean my glasses—OMG, silk ties clean glasses better than anything!—put the image of Sylvester Stallone tying that rag around his head and the moment he says in, what, #2, “I’m coming to get you, Murdock!”
After walking through this process, I don’t think I should truly call this a found poem, although it had the outlines of it. My first one, described the process this way: “
I started with the opening line of a poem I drafted over a dozen years ago, then used random web pages to suggest a few words from which would spring the next line. I let whatever revealed itself in my creative half exist without immediately squashing it, merely shaping it, translating it from my interior language-without-words to a poor imitation in English. My Editor insisted on punching meaning into it, which I allowed. At the end I decided it needed to come full circle, thus lending meaning (I hope) to the final lines.
There you have it. I think it fits in the realm of Found Poetry given the heavy-handedness some poets used to create found poems back in the day.
