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."
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The ingenious and uncanny borrowings in Foundlings: Found Poems from Prose remix and redub the literary canon with dazzling insight and wit. So much of the magic of the !found" poem resides in the acuity of the finder and, in this instance, DeWitt Henry demonstrates an extraordinary perspicacity, making transformative poems out of his dynamic relationship with existing texts. In its textured approach to classic works, Foundlings is a powerfully inventive bricolage showcasing, quizzing and subverting literary debates about authorship and canonicity.
These are truly original and often ludic works that gesture honorably and sometimes insouciantly toward the literary traditions that Henry both refers to and shrewdly recasts. Even as Henry acknowledges that many of his words originated with others, he demonstrates the extraordinary alchemy that engaged and creative intertextual gestures allow-and the wonderful way in which fresh and beguiling contemporary poetry may emerge through inventive acts of homage.
--Cassandra Atherton, author Prose Poetry: An Introduction, with Paul Hetherington; and Leftovers: Prose Poems.
Here we discover a wide range of themes and a rich blend of literary styles-and much felt life, charged with pathos... All in all, Henry draws found poems from the work of thirty prose pieces... His range covers classics as well as contemporaries, Tolstoy to Robert Coover, Samuel Richardson to Virginia Woolf to Alice Munro. His topics vary from the nature of the universe to the fathering and mothering of newborns, from romantic love to sexual objectification. A world of prose becomes a world of poetry in Henry's skillful hands.
-Jack Smith, The California Review of Books
DeWitt Henry's remarkable book Foundlings shows us that good prose is as musical as the best poetry. He discovers special moments in narrative movement that, when broken up into lines, sing like poems. This book can stand as a short course fiction. Foundlings is compelling proof that line and sentence are two sides of the same coin and what ultimately matters most is the writer's mastery of language.
-Pablo Medina, author of The Foreigner's Song: New and Selected Poems.
Somewhere between a commonplace book and the rigors of poetry, Foundlings is a rare delight, a moving record of reading and re-seeing. These literary passages, taken out of their original contexts, become dramas of their own, given the dignity of verse, and a record of DeWitt Henry"s own refining sensibility. A book of marvels.
-David Mason, author of Ludlow; former Poet Laureate of Colorado
