OFF RADAR: ‘things seemed to be breaking: visual poems’
A new book by former poet laureate Stuart Kestenbaum
By Dana Wilde
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“things seemed to be breaking: visual poems” by Stuart Kestenbaum; Deerbrook Editions, Cumberland, Maine, 2021; 136 pages, paperback, $18.50.
“Found poetry” is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. It’s made when words, phrases and sometimes entire passages from texts such as newspaper articles, advertising copy, government documents or anything else are selected out and re-arranged as poetry. Or whatever.
It’s been around since about the time Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal for an art exhibit in New York City in 1917. “The Fountain,” as he called it, was the first celebrated piece of found art. Dadaist and Surrealist writers did similar things with words through the 1920s, ’30, ’40s. By the 1950s the Beat poets, under the influence of William S. Burroughs’ determined efforts to expose the vacancies in common sense, made “cut-ups,” in which lines, phrases and strips of words are clipped from manuscripts, magazines or books, shuffled, then pieced together randomly, or in whatever order seemed appropriate. Or inappropriate. In Maine’s wing of avant-garde poetry in the 1970s, Portland’s Contraband poets made cut-up experiments of their own.