Found Poet

I was initially going to write about Pablo Neruda at the suggestion of Onur, a former intern, but after realizing I couldn’t think of anything to write for him, I went in search of found poems.

For those of you who don’t know, this is Poets.org‘s definition:

Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. [Found poetry is] [t]he literary equivalent of a collage… A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.

While looking for notable found poems, I was led to Charles Reznikoff. I stumbled upon this excerpt of Reznikoff’s Testimony: The United States (1885-1915): Recitative:

Amelia was just fourteen and out of the orphan asylum;
at her first job—in the bindery, and yes sir, yes
ma’am, oh, so anxious to please.
She stood at the table, her blond hair hanging about
her shoulders, “knocking up” for Mary and Sadie,
the stichers (“knocking up” is counting books and
stacking them in piles to be taken away).

What made me keep looking into Charles Reznikoff is that, of the three poets listed on that website as having written found poems as opposed to excerpting pieces of writing in one’s work, he was the only one with his own About The Poet page. That, in turn, led me to a biography which discussed his experience growing up as a Jewish boy in the violently anti-Semitic streets of New York, particularly in Brooklyn. I went back to researching Testimony. Unfortunately I’d have to buy the book to read it in its entirety, as it is a long poem, so I am relying exclusively on excerpts.

In Charles Simic’s review of Testimony, he states that it is “[b]ased on thousands of pages of court records spanning three decades around the turn of the twentieth century… They tell the stories of some five hundred court cases from all over this country and deal with a broad segment of the American population, urban and rural.” Given these descriptions, Reznikoff not only wrote the “first found epic poem,” but also a pure found poem, composed entirely of “case summaries.” What struck me (and Simic, to some extent) about Testimony is that the recitatives read more like small narratives than poetry, or, at least, what people imagine poetry to be:

The child, about six, thin and feeble
and sick of a disorder of its bowels,
was whipped by its father
for befouling its bed:
twenty or more “licks” with a switch
as thick as its father’s finger,
and large “whelks” left on its body.
And then, on a cold and rainy December day,
sent to its grandfather’s
in another county—
where it died in a few days.

___________________

When they told her husband
that she had lovers
all he said was:
one of them
might have a cigar
and set the barn on fire.

___________________

The conductor asked her where she was going.
“Knoxville City.”
He said: “You ought to have changed at Knoxville Junction.”
“Why didn’t you tell me when we were there?”
He told her to get off
but she wanted to stay on until the next station.

The train was stopped
and the conductor asked her if she was getting off.
He said if she didn’t
he would kick her off
and that he was tired of “damn niggers.”
He threw her bundle on the ground,
and put her baby beside it.
She followed and the train left her standing there.

I started thinking about why I think it reads like narratives. Is it because it’s free of the so-called “flowery” language typically found in poetry? Is it because I think poetry that tells a coherent story or coherently describes an event is inherently un-poetic? In that case, have I subconsciously held the belief that in order for poetry to be poetic, it has to be nearly indecipherable to some extent? The answers are yes, yes, and yes. As it turns out, I’ve been creating limitations for poetry in my own mind that don’t exist. Reznikoff stood out to me because he wrote poetry that was outside of the constrained realm of what I though poetry should be.

Reznikoff’s own comments on Testimony and what he feels poetry should be are words to reflect on, for me at least, when it comes to how we see poetry and what poetry does, both for the poet and the reader.

Testimony may be explained by T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative,” as I understand it. Something happens and it expresses something that you feel, not necessarily because of those facts, but because of entirely different facts that give you the same kind of feeling… [Testimony] is only a part of what happened, a reality that I felt as a reader and could not portray adequately in any other way… I think behind any poem there’s a background of experience and emotion that explains its moving quality. Sometimes even the poet himself may have forgotten the background. It’s a mystery.

-L