literary function. We all know the sensation of looking at a notice, an
instruction, a recipe or an advertisement and thinking that it would make
a good poem: authors of found texts act upon such impressions. The
author finds a text which is not intended for literary purposes, and then
makes the audience conceive of it as a literary object. When you are creat-
ing a found text, you leave the text exactly as it is, or modify it slightly to
emphasise its literary potential (for example by adding line breaks to make
it more like a poem).
Using found material as the basis for an artwork has been even more
common in the visual arts than in literature. The American artist Robert
Rauschenberg, for example, in the 1960s and 70s, would often include
‘real’ objects in his artworks, such as a bed.
Found objects and found texts shake up many of our fundamental
assumptions about artistic practice. For a start, found texts radically blur
the dividing line between everyday culture and high art. They raise vital
questions about what constitutes an art object, and why we value some
objects as art and not others. Marcel Duchamp’s gesture of placing a urinal
in an art gallery, signing it R. Mutt, and calling it a work of art is a partic-
ularly provocative example of found art which raises questions about what
we class as aesthetic.
In addition, found texts, like collage, challenge the whole notion of what
it means to be an author. Can an author simply put his or her name to
something which already exists? In fact, it seems as if such texts are around
us all the time anonymously but we have not yet ‘found them out’.
Let’s look at a found poem by Canadian gay activist and poet Ian Young.
It is called ‘Poem Found in a Dime Store Diary’.
Example 4.4: Found poem
Place these slips inside your diary
in the appropriate place................................................................................
Tomorrow is my wife’s birthday...............................................................................
Tomorrow is my husband’s birthday.................................................................................
Tomorrow is my wedding anniversary.........................................................
Tomorrow is my mother’s birthdayWriting as recycling 75