Found poetry’s special
edge is that it’s poetry without the poetical sensibility. The lack of violins
may partly have been what the Australian poet Laurie Duggan had in mind in
‘Hearts (1983)’, from ‘Three Found Poems’, which features such instructions to
abattoir workers as:
The hearts shall be trimmed of protruding veins and arteries makingsure the aorta valve is removed. Hearts are to be incised to enable themto be packed flat.
But while found poetry
can stage provocations, the main game has to be poems which are the poet’s own
words and ideas. This though can include poems which resemble found poems. At
least this was my approach in the sonnet sequence ‘Agriculture’, which includes
passages in an encyclopaedia-entry style. And the heavens forbid that any
farmer should mistake the poems for reliable information.
Poems, too, can be
‘found’ as they are written. And this can’t happen when the poet is right up in
the front of the poem. Back in Sydney about 1990, beginning writing poems
(something of a found poetry experience in itself actually as my first poem
started life as the opening paragraph of a short story I was working on), found
poetry wasn’t the plan at all. But by writing poems which generally were
closely focused on a subject, probably already I was in the found poetry camp.
Found poetry’s key
implication though is that all poetry is found. Here I’m definitely in the
found poetry camp, can see in my own work how ideas are never ‘original’, but
always have antecedents. For example, I returned to writing poems after a
period as a film reviewer. Over a few months I tried out various approaches,
eventually leading to the unrhymed sonnets I’ve been writing ever since. But
after producing a couple of these I noticed their distinct similarity to the
shorter of the film reviews I’d been penning and now regard my reviewing stint
as a creative writing course where I learned to write poems which are like
capsule film reviews.
Or, of several other possible
examples, a few eons ago I made an attempt to be a cartoonist, this failing
miserably partly due to a total inability to draw. But I’m sure that the
cartoon strip structure – two or three panels followed by a panel with the
punchline, so close to the structure of the Shakespearean sonnet – predisposed
me towards sonnets, and influences my approach to writing them.
And then there are any
number of poets I’ve founded my work on. The way this usually goes is that I
read a poet’s work, forget about it, and only later realise I’ve been
influenced by it. One important influence of this sort was W. H. Oliver’s
‘Counter-Revolution’, an uncompromising ‘sonnet as miniature essay’ – much more
interesting to my mind than any of Robert Lowell’s sonnets, where the
egocentric blah keeps getting in the way. Also important (and forgotten) was
the Victorian poet W. E. Henley, blurring poetry and prose in the wry, black,
‘Waiting Room’, with its super-droll likening of the hospital waiting room to
‘a cellar on promotion’. Or indeed there’s Laurie Duggan’s abattoir poem, which
only after thinking of using it for this post did it occur to me was very
likely a factor in the idea to write a sequence including some found-like
agriculture poems.
It’s this sense of
being caught up in the world which for me is where the Muse lives. And why I’m
sceptical of a lot of contemporary poetry, especially that in the first person,
is that it comes with a poetical tone which suggests the poets feel that they
are looking out over the world from some privileged perch. That’s not to say the
first person pronoun’s days are finished – for example Albert Wendt’s ‘Garden’
poems look to me a classic, giving a ‘Samoan strum’ to the sonnet form, and the
first person used without a trace of complacency.
To bring up notions of
found poetry is to ensure you don’t have a quiet life. It’s to identify oneself
as a postmodernist and the popular view of postmodernists is that when they aren’t
drinking the blood of newborn infants they are lifting other writers’ work without
attribution. I can only keep saying it’s a little more nuanced than that. For
me the whole point of postmodernism is that writers start with a blank page,
cudgel their brains to haul truth shining from the abyss, and this truth then
turning out to be just one more wrinkle in the general culture. As to the other
matter, population numbers have to be kept down somehow.
Agriculture 15
The cacao tree, from
whence chocolate, is
an understorey
rainforest species. It
can be (should be)
shade-grown, in jungly
plantations. Depending
upon continent,
jaguars or leopards
prowl below while the
pods ripen. When the
pods are ripe they are
hacked down with a
machete (a long-
handled variant used
where necessary) and
then hacked open with
one and the pulp and
seeds removed and left
to ferment, beneath
the trees all the vat
that’s needed. The
pulp sweats itself to
nothing. The seeds are
sun-dried on racks,
bagged, away then to the
various devisings of
confectioners.
David Beach