JF Ptak Science Books Post 2578
"The truest attraction of "found poetry" is that it should remain lost"-- not Marcel Duchamp
"The highest pleasure in finding poetry is the ability to lose it again"--not Ambrose Bierce
There's a certain identifiable current that runs just beneath the surface of created quotes about found poetry--and I tend to agree, except that I think I enjoy "found poetry" more so than the great majority of poetry-in general, so if I am to read any poetry at all I think that poetry must be found now and then. And the thing about Found Poetry (now capitalized!) is that is can be obscure ("Obscurity is never so clear as when it is never noticed"--not Mark Twain) or so much part of the visual culture that its very unforgivable presence makes it invisible--though I have no doubt that the overt intellectual and traitor E. pound would disagree.
Found Poetry I think has been around for a century or so, finding its roots with the Dadists and the solitary art anti-movement M. Duchamp. And probably an argument could be made for the acoustomatic continuation of another found-hyphenated movement--like Stockhausen/Varese/Xenakis musique concrète--is an outgrowth (or something) of the Found/Readymade embarkation of the nineteen-teens. Maybe too something could be made of the argument that they are all coming from a long and very slow development of trompe l'oeil and Still Life, as there is a definite visual/found quality to many of these works (as with "A Bachelor's Drawer", painted between 1890-1894 by John Haberle).
[Source: Wikimedia]
Still Life images like this of "discovered" assortments of human-created bits, snapshots of unintentional arrangements, must certainly have a sense of Foundness surrounding them. Of course, a pastoral scene of cows-in-a-field or a John Constable sky or some such are necessarily "found" because they are an uncontrollable part of nature--what I'm talking about is a discovered sense of some sort of human construction, and that certainly includes words. (On the other hand, I did write a post "The Found Poetry of the Vocabulary of Clouds" on a John Comenius text of 1726, here: http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2015/05/annotated-found-poetry-of-clouds-1726.html.)
So, for today, one part of the concept of Found Poetry I'd like to look at is in the science--in particular, title pages and indexes for works int eh sciences, and in this case the works are historic, though they could easily have been from any odd page in any opened book, anywhere.
The first example is the title page of Galileo's epochal Sidereus Nuncius (1610):
SIDEREAL MESSENGER
unfolding great and very wonderful sights
and displaying to the gaze of everyone,
but especially philosophers and astronomers,
the things that were observed by
GALILEO GALILEI,
Florentine patrician
and public mathematician of the University of Padua,
with the help of a spyglass lately devised by him,
about the face of the Moon, countless fixed stars,
the Milky Way, nebulous stars,
but especially about
four planets
flying around the star of Jupiter at unequal intervals
and periods with wonderful swiftness;
which, unknown by anyone until this day,
the first author detected recently
and decided to name
MEDICEAN STARS
[Full text via internet archive, here: https://archive.org/details/siderealmessenge80gali]
A second example comes from the impossibly accomplished Christian Huygens' Cosmotheoros, The Celestial World Discover'd: or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets--and it comes from the table of contents:
The Chapter heads, in order (!):
Some have already talk'd of the Inhabitants of the Planets, but went no fartherThe Objections of ignorant Cavillers prevented
This Enquiry not overcurious
Conjectures not useless, because not certain
These Studies useful to Religion
Copernicus's System explain'd
Arguments for the truth of it
The Proportion of the Magnitude of the Planets, in respect of one another, and the Sun
The Lamell more convenient than Micrometers
The Earth justly liken'd to the Planets, and the Planets to it
Arguments from their Similitude of no small weight
The Planets are solid, and not without Gravity
Have Animals and Plants
Not to be imagin'd too unlike ours
Planets have Water
But not just like ours
Plants grow and are nourish'd there as they are here
The same true of their Animals
Great variety of Animals in this Earth
And no less in the Planets
The same in Plants
Vices of Men no hindrance to their being the Glory of the Planet they inhabit
Reason not different from what 'tis here
They have Senses
Sight
Hearing
A Medium to convey Sound to the Ear
Touch
Smell and Tast
Their Senses not very different from ours
They have Pleasure arising from the Senses
All the Planets have Fire
The bigness of their Creatures not rightly guest at by the bigness of the Planets
In the Planets are many sorts of rational Creatures as well as here
Men chiefly differ from Beasts in the study of Nature
They have Astronomy
And all its subservient Arts
Geometry and Arithmetick
And Writing
And Opticks
These Sciences not contrary to Nature
They have Hands
And Feet
That they are upright
It follows not therefore that they have the same shape with us
A rational Soul may inhabit another Shape than ours
The Planetarians not less than we
They live in Society
They enjoy the pleasures of Society
They have Houses to secure 'em from Weather
They have Navigation, and all Arts subservient
As Geometry
They have Musick
The Advantages we reap from Herbs and Animals
And from Metals
From the discoveries of our Age
The Planets have, tho not these same, yet as useful Inventions
Book 2
Kircher's Journey in Ecstacy examin'd
The System of the Planets in Mercury
In VenusIn Mars
Jupiter and Saturn the most eminent of the Planets both for bigness and attendants
The proportion of the Diameter of Jupiter, and of the Orbs of his Satellites, to the Orbit of the Moon round the Earth
The periods of Jupiter's Moons
And Saturn's
This proportion true according to all modern Observations
The apparent magnitude of the Sun in Jupiter, and a way of finding what light they there enjoy
And in Saturn
Always the same length
They see the fixt Stars just as we do
The appearances of the Ring in Saturn
Very little to be said of the Moon
The Guards of Jupiter and Saturn are of the same nature with our Moon
The Moon hath Mountains
But no Sea, nor Rivers, nor Clouds, nor Air and Water
The Astronomy of the Inhabitants of the Moon
This may be applied to the Moons about Jupiter and Saturn
The immense distance between the Sun and Planets illustrated
No ground for Conjecture in the Sun
The Faculty in the Sun not easily seen
By reason of its Heat no Inhabitants like ours can live in the Sun
The fix'd Stars so many Suns
They are not all in the same Sphere
The Stars have Planets about them like our Sun
A way of making a probable guess at the distance of the Stars
Every Sun has a vortex round it, very different from those of Cartes
[You can read more on this in an earlier post I made on the Huygens, here: http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2014/09/huygens_found_poetry.html]
The Huygens is particularly beautiful, with bountiful surprises of wide possibility: "No ground for Conjecture in the Sun", "Every Sun has a vortex round it", and so on.
There's much more of course, "The fix'd Stars so many Suns", as much as you can see--but these two will do for now.
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