David Graham's
P O E T I C   L I C E N S E
Notes on Poetry, Poems, and Poets 
grahamd@ripon.edu

​David Graham's POETIC LICENSE September 2020 No.45

Whose Words These Are, I Think I Know:
Mixed Emotions about Found Poetry & Originality

One of my earliest publications was this modest lyric, composed when I was first studying poetry in college, later appearing in a campus literary magazine:

Of course, if you’ve read Moby Dick, as I recently had, you’ll doubtless recognize that I didn’t exactly write the above poem. I merely arranged it, lifting part of a sentence I loved from Melville’s chapter with the same title. In breaking this nugget of his lyrical prose into free verse, I was, I suppose, aiming to mimic the tone and style of the classical Chinese lyrics I was eagerly discovering in Kenneth Rexroth’s translations. Even after all these years, I’d say it’s a fairly decent effort, if hardly profound. It was certainly a lot better than most of the original poems I was emitting back then. I don’t recall exactly where I got the idea to experiment with what we call “found” poetry; quite possibly I’d seen some in anthologies or journals.

But what strikes me most now is that even back then the very idea of found poetry seemed just a little bit suspect, even disreputable. Sure, a found poem could be a pleasant amusement, a brief diversion from the real work of poetry writing, but serious poets are makers. They create; they don’t merely find. I never did anything further with my little Moby Dick experiment; nor have I composed many found poems in the decades since then. I’m not entirely sure where my skepticism came from. Maybe I had absorbed it unconsciously. After all, I was in college, a culture where the worst possible academic crime is plagiarism.

At around the same time I fell in love with Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” which appeared on his 1973 solo album, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. The lyrics were classic Simon, still some of my favorites from his massive catalog; but where had I heard that melody before? The credits listed Simon as composer of both words and music, but I knew that wasn’t right. Eventually I remembered that Peter, Paul, and Mary had sung a different set of lyrics with just about the same melody line: it was “Because All Men Are Brothers,” from their 1965 record See What Tomorrow Brings. On that album the words were credited to Theodor Lloyd Glazer and music to a certain J.S. Bach. And not only was it Bach, but a much-loved melody featured in his “St. Matthew Passion.” Turns out that the American tune was German! Simon had plagiarized a song in the public domain, giving credit to himself! But the story doesn’t end there. Years later I discovered that Bach had in fact borrowed the melody also, from an earlier secular song composed by one Hans Leo Hassler, “Mein G’müt ist mir verwirret.” Aha! Bach was a plagiarist too, composing new lyrics on what we might call a “found” melody.

Well, I was naive in 1973 about the nature of music, and, I’m afraid, poetry as well. As Pete Seeger liked to say, quoting his musicologist father, “Plagiarism is basic to all culture.” And as with music, so too with poetry. Not that I can claim any sudden or decisive epiphany. At first, like most poets starting out, I “[thought] continually of those who were truly great,” in Stephen Spender’s words. I dreamed of joining Dickinson, Yeats and the rest. I yearned to be “clothed from head to foot in song”—as Spender put it in the single poem he’s remembered for today. Found poetry thus seemed the poetic equivalent of novelty songs in pop music—amusing on the first go, maybe, but far from the enduring literature I was after. There’s a small irony, of course, in the fact that these assumptions about originality and greatness were not original to me. You could call them Found Opinions.

The larger issue here has to do with the whole notion of originality. My clumsy and naive experiments in found poetry ultimately led me toward a more nuanced view of poetry, and left me, even today, with a lot of mixed feelings about almost every matter of importance.

For one thing, once you get past the humorous hyperbole, isn’t there a sense in which Seeger’s father was simply correct? Poems find their substance in the capital-T Tradition, in both ideas and language that are in common circulation, sometimes for hundreds of years. As T. S. Eliot argued in his influential essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," the canon forms the foundation for all true originality. Aside from the relatively few and mostly unreadable radical experimentalists, who are exceptions proving the rule, we use the language we have inherited, more or less straight. We arrange and emphasize, yes; and we certainly invent new arrangements of the old themes. We may even be so lucky as to coin a phrase or two that gets "lodged," in Frost's marvelous term, in the public mind.

But the materials of both theme and language tend to be in common usage already; and so most of us arrange and re-form more than we purely invent. And consciously or not, what we write tends to resemble what others are writing at the same time. That’s normal and natural, and helps explain why there is such a thing as a period style. It’s hard to recognize when you’re living in it, of course. But consider how easy it is now to distinguish the average author of Shakespeare’s era from one of Wordsworth’s, or Plath’s—just on stylistic grounds. But you don’t have to wait a hundred years to glimpse instances of a period style. Anyone who has ever judged a poetry contest, for instance, soon recognizes that certain metaphors, vocabulary, and stylistic moves become fashionable, and then, like all fashion, fade away. Likewise anyone editing a poetry journal quickly becomes aware of various clichés of the moment. If you go looking, you can glimpse aspects of period style everywhere.

Let us count just a few of the ways we are seldom as original as we may dream ourselves to be. Sometimes, as in the case of poetic epigraphs, we take language from prior poems verbatim as springboards for our own explorations. Also, in every age we re-tell the old legends and refashion and translate the classics to our own taste. In the current era of poetry workshops sprouting up everywhere and an explosion of creative writing programs, the journals are rich with poems produced in such settings: such things as centos, imitations, homages, found poetry, erasure poems, and poems “after” others. You could build a small library of recent craft books—many quite excellent—full of prompts, example poems to imitate, exercises in found poetry, and so forth.

Additionally, in or outside of the workshop setting, we often employ allusion in our poems, hidden or explicit. We may quote other poems within our own, credited or not. We mix and match among the voices in our own heads that we grew up hearing. (Thinking here of William Carlos Williams locating a major source of his own inspiration in "the speech of Polish mothers" who were his patients). Consciously or not, we write poems “after” our poetic heroes. And so forth. Again, all of this indebtedness seems normal, even if a bit accelerated recently by the creative writing boom and the proliferation of poetry sites on the internet. We all stand on the shoulders of those who have preceded us, and this is true whether or not we acknowledge it. No poem that hopes to be in some fashion fresh or new is exempt from these ties to the phrases, ideas, forms, and styles of the past.

I’ve written before about an instructive anthology titled Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems, edited by Kurt Brown and Harold Schecter. This book presents poems both famous and not that were written in response to prior poems. It is a “dialogue across space and time,” as the jacket copy puts it, and a delightful conversation it is. It is also a reminder that the history of poetry is more like an extended conversation than a series of disconnected monologues.

One of my favorite pairings links William Carlos Williams with a poet he’s seldom likened to, Wallace Stevens. Here is Williams’s poem:

Now let’s look at what Stevens did with this tiny lyric. He quotes Williams’s poem entire as an epigraph, then issues this response:

Characteristically, Stevens proceeds to embroider Williams’s simple epigram, qualifying, complicating, adding his typical rhetorical flourishes and fancy vocabulary (“any humanity that suffuses / you,” “Be not chimera of morning”). Not for nothing does Stevens employ the term “nuances.” All of which effectively sets up his powerful closure—a straightforward simile (“Like a widow’s bird / Or an old horse”) that could have been penned by Williams.

In other words, Stevens sounds just like Stevens, and Williams like Williams; yet as a pair they are larger than the sum of parts. And needless to say, Stevens’s Stevensian lyric would not exist had he not found and been inspired by Williams’.

A particularly delicious example of this phenomenon of conversation also involves Williams. Almost everyone knows his little plum poem, which he reports was an actual note he left on his icebox for his wife Flossie to find:

Not everyone knows that, as Williams reported, Flossie did write a poem. He always insisted that hers was better than his. Here’s what Flossie wrote, as reported by Bill:

Is Flossie’s poem better than Bill’s? I am not sure I’d say so. But what does seem clear to me is that the interplay between the two widens my appreciation of both, and I’m grateful that this little marital back-and-forth was preserved, with all its layerings and charm.

Of course, none of what I’ve written here is news—which is in a way my point. Literary scholars, teachers, and historians make careers out of tracing lines of influence. Yet poets themselves often deny or resist such lines of thinking. Why? Out of vanity perhaps? Self-delusion? Or could it be a self-protective urge not to watch the boiling pot too closely? Or the old familiar urge to be that mythical case, utterly original? Possibly a messy and shifting amalgamation of all the above, I suppose. In any case, many of us do frequently deny, downplay, or dismiss the very idea of such influence as well as the specifics of our own indebtedness.

Still, as Joseph Conrad advised, we should trust the tale, not the teller. And the tale of poetry is obviously the tale of massive indebtedness, ranging from scrupulously annotated borrowings of phrasing to outright plagiarism, sometimes inadvertent. I myself once lifted a choice phrase from one of Roethke's poems without realizing, a fact I only discovered by accident after it was published. Roethke had written, in “Praise to the End!” this line: “I’ve crawled from the mire, alert as a saint / or a dog.” And it bubbled up in my unconscious mind when I wrote this passage, opening an old poem titled “Self-Portrait With Preferences”:

I thought that last line was a most striking simile, and it was—it just wasn’t mine. I remember having a nagging feeling that something wasn’t right. Yet I set aside my vague misgivings and sent my poem out to a journal. It was published; and then, some time later, while re-reading Roethke I came across the phrase I’d inadvertently pilfered. Oops! The good news was that I was able to revise it out before I collected the poem in a book. I may be mostly agnostic about the intrinsic worth of found poems, but outright plagiarism? I do draw the line at that.

As for my current opinion of found poetry, that most nakedly unoriginal of forms, I plead guilty to contradicting myself and indulging endlessly in mixed emotions. In truth, I’ve always loved Auden’s definition of poetry as “the clear expression of mixed emotions,” which posits clarity and craft as better guides to poetic value than vexed notions of genius and originality.

I do have continuing mixed emotions about a common sort of found poem, the kind that aims at ridicule or satire by using someone’s words against them. Oh, I don’t mind it when satirists go after the powerful in this way: politicians, self-help gurus, and other public figures are fair game. Who did not enjoy, for instance, this arrangement of one of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s philosophical ruminations:

Clearly we are meant, in reading such a piece, to reflect on how a brilliant and powerful mind can simultaneously be amazingly foolish; how such a person can, for instance, help lead the nation into an utterly predictable fiasco like the war in Iraq while fueled with such intellectual blather.

So I’d agree that similar political found poems are fair game, along a spectrum from harmless fun to biting satire. But a bit more slippery, in ethical terms, is another kind of found poem that I myself have indulged in. When I began teaching freshman composition, wading each semester through thousands of pages of often clumsy or hasty student prose, I started keeping a collection of notable typos, malapropisms, spell-check mistakes, and other goofy prose that crossed my desk. Some were inadvertently funny. Some were just odd. Others were so awkward that they almost seemed poignant. In grad school, my office mates were so amused by one example that I shared with them that, as a parting gift, they bestowed on me a T shirt with the unfortunate student’s sentence emblazoned on it: “Sure there’s equality,” this student had written, “but to an extent.” After a few years I got the urge to make a found poem out of some of my favorite examples of odd student sentences, and composed the following:

After “writing” it I did read this piece a few times in public, taking pains each time to reassure my listeners that my aim was not to mock my students who are anonymously quoted, but to glory in the quirks of the English language. It was my hope to explore how, in poetry, there can be a fine line between the awkward or incorrect and the truly expressive. That last sentence, for instance, still strikes me as quite wonderful and moving: “I just look at my Dad with a smile of no meaning.” And isn’t the title a line that Samuel Beckett or John Ashbery could have written?

But I was never tempted to publish this found poem. And I think it’s not that I was bothered by its unoriginality so much as its ethics. I may insist all I want that I’m not intending mockery, but I know that some readers will take it that way. And maybe in my heart of hearts I’m not completely sure it isn’t a cheap shot, professor aiming at students.

So my career as a maker of found poems has been slim and spotty. Still, I that doesn’t mean I haven’t lifted ideas, rhythms, and more from other poets; or quoted them verbatim. I have largely come to terms with the notion that we find poems in other poems as much as we discover them in the world at large or purely in our own imaginations and dreams. Every poet's mind is a scrap heap, and every poet is a magpie. It’s probably saying too much to insist that all poetry is found poetry. Still, the character of a poet is often revealed in the texture of his or her indebtedness: the various ways these inevitable borrowings are acknowledged, hidden, mixed, flaunted, understated, confused, transformed, and so forth.

I suppose I’ve come a long way from the younger me dreaming of being utterly original, not realizing that my only models for such a thing were the very poets I loved and imitated as best I could. Now I say: Why not carry on an explicit conversation with the poets you admire most? And why not do so openly rather than attempting to hide it? Billy Collins wrote, in his humorous way, that the trouble with poetry was that it leads to more poetry. I say, in complete seriousness, that that’s not poetry’s trouble but its glory.

© 2020 David Graham

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