How I learnt to stop worrying and love randomness
Divination, randomness, and rearranging everyday grammars
“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”
― Emily Dickinson
Hi friends – it’s me, Hen.
It’s been a wild transfer of power since Sana began Diary Of An Artist, leaving me with the reins of the newsletter that started it all – Found Poems.
I last wrote an entry of this back in 2021, when I was reading a lot of Kae Tempest. So, it’s been a minute. I’m not entirely sure what we’ll end up covering – but I’ll be feeling my way around, seeing what aspects of poetic practice seem relevant, or useful, or beautifully useless enough to be worth sharing. I look forward to doing this on a regular cadence (monthly?) as much as the muses allow.
I’ve been in something of an indecision fever dream the past few months, trying to plan out the next chapter in a post-burnout, post-office life. Noodling around on a freelance schedule, pinballing between too much to do and too little, if generally grateful for the freedom to figure out the balance myself – and weighing up alternate possible futures for myself.
Well, reader, you guessed it, I’m doing the poetry thing. I just finished a breathlessly busy course with Out-Spoken Press, run by some of my favourite poets – Caroline Bird, Jack Underwood, and Anthony Anaxagorou, who have been keeping me occupied for the past six weeks, getting me to interrogate my usual poetry grammar and try a few new things. Inspired by Sana’s descent into artistic madness, I’m very much doubling down on the art of poetry.
And I find myself increasingly attracted to madness, or randomness – away from the pressures of a perfectly-engineered masterpiece (as if!) and towards curiosity, seeing how the chips might fall with a lighter touch.
I’ve spent the past weekend trying to divine meanings out of the random, cutting up words from old magazines, shuffling them around, and moulding the resulting sequence into something resembling a poem. It feels a little like divination, or reading tea leaves – feeling your way towards a truth with instinct, and insight, instead of pre-planned logic.
A little extract from one of these randomised poem architectures, with a little help from a summer issue of New Scientist. Part horoscope, part Wikipedia article, part something else I can’t put my finger on:
without tired, giant secrets, the climate of your exoplanet
is drawn to a new you. it’s good how hunting takes out
disease, probes it of surprise, or boosts the hardness of the
super-monkey, guide of the nonsense planet. the art inside
that learns of the first proton, then predicts the asteroid.
I’ve always loved the work of Sam Riviere, who makes a lot of found poems out of google search results – massaged a little, I assume, into something that sparks the eye. Here’s one of his poems from Kim Kardashian’s Marriage:
spooky berries
Edgar Allan Poe
has written a very eerie poem this month
with many allusions to the latest botanical blogging.A very cute hand
carved natural pumpkin
hanging about 6.5 ft in the air,and my little lens wasn’t cutting it.
So I popped on my big lens
and got it all.
While I like some of what I usually write (at least 40%, I think), this collage-like process has allowed me to come up with lines I would never do consciously. By giving up a bit of control, the possibilities on the page have opened up a little wider.
It’s a good lesson, for me at least, when trying to precisely engineer a poem, or craft the next chapter of my life – control is all about making your possibilities smaller.
Writing, I think, should be the opposite of that.
Signed,
Hen
Welp! Thanks for reading my first official missive as Found Poems operator! I’ll be a little less navel-gazing in coming issues (probably) and share more of other people’s work I’ve found inspiring, or interesting, or weird.
Do let me know in a comment any big poetry questions you’re dwelling on, and I’ll try to weave my way towards answers (or better yet, more questions) in the issues ahead. Live long and prosper 🖖