text and framed it as a poem, so that this kind of intertextual connection
can be made.
When you are creating found texts you have to be observant as well as
imaginative. Many texts that you read during your daily existence (like
instructions on tins of food) could be the basis for a found poem, if you
focused on their language, structure and possible meanings rather than
simply on their utility. Letters and other forms of communication may
also be potent as found texts. Moya Costello’s ‘Covering Letters (A Found
Story)’ (1994, pp. 115–18) are letters from and to the editors of literary
journals, and are based on her experience as an editor and writer. In close
juxtaposition they both illuminate and satirise the frustrating process of
trying to get into print (for the writer) and wading through a pile of indif-
ferent submissions (for the editor).
Start looking at the texts around you, and see whether you can turn
them into a found text.
RECYCLING AS REWRITING
Exercise 3 engages with the rewriting of a classic text, fairytale or myth
from a contemporary point of view. To do this you need to take a text
(usually a familiar one) such as Jane Eyre ,or Hamlet , and rewrite it from a
new perspective. This would usually be a contemporary perspective, but it
might also be a feminist or postcolonial one. Bringing the story up to date
is crucial (there is not much point if you start with an archaic fairytale and
then produce another one in the same mode). Modernising the story can
be very illuminating because classic texts such as King Lear or Middle-
march are part of our cultural heritage; they are familiar to many of
us, and it’s very easy to accept them without really questioning the
assumptions on which they were built. They were also written in the past,
so rewriting them can be a way of examining how attitudes—both about
writing and about history—have changed. The process makes us rethink
the text, and rewriting can bring out certain elements which were
suppressed in the original. Wide Sargasso Sea , by British/West Indies writer
Jean Rhys (1966), for example, is a feminist and postcolonial rewriting of
the novel Jane Eyre.
‘The Bloody Chamber’, a story by Angela Carter (1981), is a rewriting of
the classic Bluebeard fairytale. In the fairytale Bluebeard, who is old and
ugly, gives his young wife a bunch of keys and tells her expressly not to use
one of them, which opens a forbidden chamber. The young wife, however,
cannot resist the temptation to open the locked room: when she does she
finds the bodies of Bluebeard’s previous wives, whom he has murdered.
Writing as recycling 77