Found Poems & Passages |

from Foundlings: Found Poems From Prose

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.

Contributor
DeWitt Henry

DeWitt Henry’s poetry collection, Restless For Words: Poems, is due from Finishing Line Press in December 2022. His collections of prose are Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays and Endings and Beginnings, both via MadHat Press. He was the founding editor of Ploughshares and serves as a contributing editor to both Solstice and Woven Tale Press. Details at www.dewitthenry.com.

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