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Foundlings: Found Poems From Prose
Thirty-four poems transformed by DeWitt Henry from the original prose by twenty-nine classic and contemporary authors, ranging from Tolstoy to Twain, Joyce to Kinkaid, Woolf to Munro, Swift to D.H. Lawrence, Eliot to Bowen, and more. "By following instinct and trusting my impulses," the author writes, "I propose my thematic blind, which includes loneliness, grief, isolation, the patriarchal bell-jarring of women, capitalist and racist exploitation of the needy, issues of conscience and dehumanization in war, courtship, the male gaze, fantasy in love, vitality in dying, male helplessness in birthing, children defying parents, the need for 'stupidity,' sentimental excesses, nihilism and its terrors, and grace and urgency of art itself. In short, the issues of mu life, of living, and of our times, if not all times."
142 pages, Paperback
Published September 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 4, 2022
Creating a new literary form can be exciting, but also risky, especially when the writer incorporates texts from genres established centuries earlier to create a unique mode of poetic expression. So, congratulations are due to DeWitt Henry for his highly original poetry collection, Foundlings: Found Poems from Prose. Interweaving prose from such diverse writers as Jamaica Kincaid, George Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Leo Tolstoy with his own lines and stanzas, Henry has created a form that pays homage to both the prose writer’s artistry and the poetic mandates for rhythm, meter, line-breaks and succinctness.
At times, the poetry Henry found in the original text was there all along, but unnoticed amid all the other thousands of words as in “Home Birth” quoted directly from Anna Karenina:
“Smiling, hardly able
To restrain his tears,
Levin kissed his wife
And went out of the dark room.”
In other instances, Henry uses less of the original writer’s prose and lets his own poetic skill shine more. In his “Art’s Dwelling” he quotes Virginia Wolff’s To the Lighthouse extensively, but in this particular stanza only the four words in quotation marks are hers. The rest are Henry’s.
The old gentleman, family, and guests arrived.
An older writer. A woman painter. Others
They’d had up to twenty guests before.
And now again, “The house was full.”
Readers of poetry and prose alike will find much to admire in this fascinating collection, because in the end, whether the author is a fiction writer or a poet, wonderful words matter.
At times, the poetry Henry found in the original text was there all along, but unnoticed amid all the other thousands of words as in “Home Birth” quoted directly from Anna Karenina:
“Smiling, hardly able
To restrain his tears,
Levin kissed his wife
And went out of the dark room.”
In other instances, Henry uses less of the original writer’s prose and lets his own poetic skill shine more. In his “Art’s Dwelling” he quotes Virginia Wolff’s To the Lighthouse extensively, but in this particular stanza only the four words in quotation marks are hers. The rest are Henry’s.
The old gentleman, family, and guests arrived.
An older writer. A woman painter. Others
They’d had up to twenty guests before.
And now again, “The house was full.”
Readers of poetry and prose alike will find much to admire in this fascinating collection, because in the end, whether the author is a fiction writer or a poet, wonderful words matter.
October 1, 2022
I enjoyed this collection very much. It was clever and thoughtful but also quite moving at times -- great attention to language and what it means to find the poetry in prose.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews