FOUND POETRY

FOUND POETRY The found poet discovers poetry in language not her or his own. The simplest strategy is to break apart prose into lines, with appropriately sensitive line-breaks. William Butler Yeats took Walter Pater’s prose evocation of the Mona Lisa and, retyping it into free verse, made it the initial poem in his The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). Some of the Comte De Lautréamont ’s Les Chants de Maldoror (posthumously published in 1890) were, scholars discovered, direct quotations from…