Foundlings: Found Poems from Prose by DeWitt Henry (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Foundlings: Found Poems from Prose by DeWitt Henry
• Michael Joyce (bio)

foundlings: found poems from prose DeWitt Henry
Gazebo Books
https://gazebobooks.com.au/product/foundlings/
142 pages; Print, $20.00

In Wallace Stevens's long poem "The Comedian as the Letter C," his perhaps comic, vaguely semi-autobiographical character, the poet and "introspective voyager" Crispin, sails from "Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next, / And then to," well, (North) Carolina, where, having seen "how much / Of what he saw he never saw at all," Crispin

gripped more closely the essential proseAs being, in a world so falsified,The one integrity for him, the oneDiscovery still possible to make,To which all poems were incident, unlessThat prose should wear a poem's guise at last.

In his extraordinary career, DeWitt Henry has come to see much of what without him—as essayist, fiction writer, professor, founding editor of Ploughshares, and now in this first book of poems, Foundlings—we might not have come upon elsewise. Here, prose indeed morphs to "wear a poem's guise" as Henry crafts discoveries of integrity and grace from well-known (even beloved) prose, found poems that seem not merely (co)incident but immanent. In the process he charts new channels to sail among the straits of what we think we know after a century at least of found poetry from Blaise Cendrars to Annie Dillard to Mary Rueffle.

A found poem must hew, perhaps not obviously, to constraints and procedures [End Page 111] not unlike those of Oulipo. The first being that the would-be poet—the "finder"—must actively find in the often overlooked quotidian of familiar texts a "new" text whose sound and sense (to use traditional, if not outmoded, literary terms) are the overlooked (and/or unsounded) here in there.

Geoff Bouvier's 2016 essay on the prose poem as a "more rigorous text" offers an exercise for teasing out whether "breaking our prose sentences into poetic lines as a temporary editing gesture [might] help to strengthen those sentences … reconstituted as prose." His example takes "a block of simple prose writing," a weather report "lifted purely at random from a national news source," and "look[s] at the same prose in a completely different typographical arrangement … to see what this prose needs to make it more visual and aural, more charged, more intense, more 'poetic.'"

In his "Author's Note," Henry expands upon this basic constraint of both verbal and visual designing as a process of finding "how lines became verses and verses became stanzas; how blank spaces or 'silences' serve like a frame for painting or photograph; how punctuation, meter, stresses and pauses create emphasis and voice."

This is all well and (for some found poems, very) good. However, another set of constraints bears upon (apologies to unrepentant New Critics) the intentions of the poet doing the finding. In his example exercises, Bouvier provides leeway to the would-be poet, a witty set of anti-constraints, if you will (although one supposes un vrai Oulipian would not avoid seeing the prior constraints as redoubled rather than canceled). "Let's add a little description in each sentence," Bouvier writes of the weather report, "and change a word or two. Also, a small measure of frivolity might balance the seriousness, and create a sense of balance that gives … the feel of a poetic whole."

Henry, rather than adding a soupçon of frivolity, is intent upon laying out real constraints, stirring up the original alphabet soup so that its latent poems, foundlings, float transparently up. "I set out rules," Henry writes in the "Author's Note" and enumerates seven.

By all rights a reviewer should perhaps have read the original source works. I confess myself guilty of not having done so, only partly rationalizing by editorial deadlines and Henry's Rule 1 "not to assume, however well-known the original text, that my reader would be familiar with it." The fact is, [End Page 112] though Henry and I are contemporaries and have been engaged in more or less the same professions, I have simply not read as much as he.

That said, the writers of the source works...