A Note on Foundlings
Is it too grand to cite the example of Shakespeare’s “intertextual” borrowing, say, from Plutarch’s prose “Life of Marcus Antonius” channeled for Enobarbus’s verse account of Cleopatra’s first entrance? In my collection, Foundlings, I fashion poems from the prose fiction of Alice Munro, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, and 30 other classics and contemporaries.
I choose passages that have stayed in mind, that sometimes suggest each other in subject or theme, and that also epitomize their authors’ visions. I follow certain rules: 1) not to assume, however well-known the original text, that my reader would be familiar with it; 2) to use only the original text’s words if possible; 3) to indicate my own words and attitudes by a new title, and/or brackets or lack of quote marks, and/or the breaks for verses and stanzas; 4) to indicate my deletions; 5) to indicate my paraphrase, summary, or explicit commentary; 6) to be responsibly acquainted with the entire work I quote from; and 7) to acknowledge in a note the original author and source, thereby inviting readers to compare my poem to its source text and context.
As Munro’s planetarium attempts an artificial show of the universe — and risks hubris, if not heresy — Foundlings presents constellations of self-standing poems, each intended to evoke a master text and to “reuse” its language.
—DeWitt Henry
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Planetarium
A man’s voice,
an eloquent professional voice
began to speak slowly
out of walls.
The dark ceiling was filling with stars.
The Milky Way appeared, was moving closer;
stars swam into brilliance and kept on going,
disappearing beyond the edges
of the sky-screen.
The voice presented the stunning facts.
A few lightyears away, it announced,
the sun appears as a bright star
and planets are not visible. A few dozen
lightyears away, the sun is not visible.
A few dozen lightyears …
only about a thousandth part
of the distance from the sun
to the center of our galaxy,
one galaxy, which contains
about two hundred billion suns.
And is, in turn, one of
millions, perhaps billions
of galaxies …
When the show was over
I sat in my seat
while children clambered across me …
An effort had been made
to get their attention, to take it away
from canned pop and potato chips
and fix it on various knowns and unknowns
and horrible immensities,
and it seemed to have failed …
Children have a natural immunity,
most of them, and it shouldn’t be
tampered with. As for the adults
who would deplore it,
the ones who promoted this show,
weren’t they immune themselves?
… they could put in the
echo-chamber effects, the music,
the church-like solemnity
simulating the awe that
they supposed they ought to feel.
Awe … once you knew what it was,
you wouldn’t be courting it.
Two men came with brooms
to sweep up the debris
the audience had left behind.
Found poem from “The Moons of Jupiter” by Alice Munro
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Courtship
The wealthy farmer had broken his leg.
The young doctor rode from town to treat him.
The farmer’s daughter
“always accompanied” the doctor
“to the foot of the steps outside the door”
while his horse was brought around.
They “stood there silent;
the breeze eddied around her
swirling the stray wisps of hair at her neck,
or sending her apron strings flying
like streamers around her waist.
“Once … she was standing there
on a day of thaw …, when tree bark
was oozing sap and the snow
was melting on the roofs.
“She went inside for her parasol,
and opened it. The parasol
was of rosy iridescent silk,
and the sun pouring through it
painted the white skin of her face
with flickering patches of light.
“Beneath it, she smiled …
and drops of water could be heard
falling one by one on the taut moire.”
Found poem in Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (translated by Francis Steegmuller)
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Home Birth
Levin, the young husband,
“looking at the tiny, pitiful creature,
made strenuous efforts”
to find “some traces of
fatherly feeling for it …
He felt nothing … but disgust.
“But when it was undressed
and he caught a glimpse of
wee, wee, little hands, little feet,
saffron-colored, with little toes, too;
and positively with a little big toe
different from the rest, and when
he saw [the nurse] closing the wide-open
little hands…and putting them into
linen garments,
such pity for the little creature
came upon him, and such terror
that she would hurt it,
that he held her hand back.”
She laughed and told hm
not to be frightened.
Kitty asked for her baby; held
and nursed it in their bed.
She “would not let the baby go.
He fell asleep in her arms.
‘Look now,’ said Kitty,
turning the baby so he could see it.
“The aged-looking little face
suddenly puckered up still more …
the baby sneezed.
“Smiling, hardly able
to restrain his tears,
Levin kissed his wife
and went out of the dark room.”
He felt “a torture of apprehension.”
[A vulnerability] “so painful at first …
that it prevented him from noticing
the strange thrill of senseless joy
and even pride that he had felt
when the baby sneezed.”
Found poem in Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Constance Garnett)
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Dewitt Henry’s Foundlings, published in September 2022 by Life Before Man, the poetry imprint of Gazebo Books.