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Poetry books seldom require explanation, but this one does. 
Excepting only some titles and subtitles, I did not write a word 
of it. Other hands composed the poems’ lines—the poems’ 
sentences. These are found poems. 

They differ substantially, however, from what we usually think 
of as found poems. Usually those happy poets (including me) 
who write found poetry go pawing through popular culture like 
sculptors on trash heaps. They hold and wave aloft usable 
artifacts and fragments: jingles and ad copy, menus and 
broadcasts—all objets trouvés, the literary equivalents of 
Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and Duchamp’s bicycle. 

By entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. 
The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between 
two poles. The poet adds, or at any rate increases, the element of 
delight. This is an urban, youthful, ironic, cruising kind of 
poetry. It serves up whole texts, or uninterrupted fragments of 
texts. 

This volume, instead of presenting whole texts as “found,” 
offers poems built from bits of broken text. The poems are 
original as poems; their themes and their orderings are invented. 
Their sentences are not. Their sentences come from the books 
named. I lifted them. Sometimes I dropped extra words; I never 
added a word. 

Some of the section headings are my own (“ A Comical 
Question for Boys”). Most come from the books themselves, 
even the wondrous heading from Junior High School English, 
“Studying and Making Little Poems Packed with Meaning.” 

In the course of composing such found poems, the original 
authors’ intentions were usually first to go. A nineteenth-century 
Russian memoir of hunting and natural history yields a poem 
about love and death. A book of nineteenth-century 
oceanographic data yields a poem about seeing. A nineteenth-
century manual of boys’ projects yields a poem about growing 
old—and so forth. Others, of course, pin down less readily. 

Two of these poems raise other points. The New Testament 
Apocrypha is a loose collection of written legends and, chiefly, 
torn and damaged fragments. Scholar-editors print such texts 
carefully to show—using ellipses and question marks—where 
fragments break off and which translations are guesses. 

An edition of the New Testament Apocrypha yields a poem 
about the baffling quality of Christ’s utterances and the absurdly 
fragmentary nature of spiritual knowledge. Like many of these 
poems, it looks surprisingly sober on the page. It certainly does 
not do to rob a brilliant literary stylist of sentences, rearrange 
them as poetry, and fob off the work as one’s own. Consequently
the poem “Mayakovsky in New York” requires explanation, for 
Mayakovsky was a poet quite before I took wild liberties. He 
wrote his own poems about United States cities (ably edited 
by Patricia Blake in The Bedbug and Selected Poetry). 

The prose text I mined here, however, is a hastily written piece 
of travel journalism of some sixty-one pages. Its subject meets 
only glancingly the poem’s subject. This is editing at its 
extreme: writing without composing. Half the poems seek to 
serve poetry’s oldest and most sincere aims with one of its 
newest and most ironic methods, to dig deep with a shallow tool. 

The other half are just jokes. 

We are not interested in tree limbs 
Weighted with Spanish moss. 
What we want to know is 
Why arms go limp. Is it the pain of blocking 
Too many hooks? Is it the aching 
That comes from throwing 
Too many punches too soon? We want facts, not 
French phrases.
—A letter to Sports Illustrated by James P. Lewandowski, Toledo, Ohio. February 18, 1974 

I want to use the world rather than my own invention.— Ellsworth Kelly, The Painter’s Eye