Sam Gwynn's sonnet exemplifies a technique that he has mastered whereby he builds a beautiful and comic poem out of some arresting scrap or scraps of language. I am thinking also of his (forgive me if I haven't got the titles quite right) "Ballade Beginning with a Line from Robert Bly" and to some extent of "Approaching a Significant Birthday He Peruses the Norton Anthology of Poetry."
Having seen Sam read, I known that he is not Walter Benjamin. Nonetheless, I see certain similarities in these found poems (for lack of a better term) and Benjamin's Passagenwerk. While Benjamin's project was historical or archaeological, his instinct was I believe the same as Sam's -- to piece together scraps of the culture we inhabit in order to create some restatement of or comment on that culture.
More generally, what I find so charming in these poems is that they play on a basic component of modernist and post-modern sensibilities, in which the artist is confronted by both the weight of the cultural tradition and the random urgencies of everyday life.
Can forum participants recommend other poets who construct poems as Sam has done, or is he the inventor and sole practitioner of this technique?
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