Over the course of the summer of 2005, I revisited writings I had read in the book Art in Theory: 1900 - 2000. Stemming from my revisit to this art historical material I began to notice that I am an avid underliner while I read. I would underline countless passages of information I found to be significant, defacing a written work with my scrawl of affirmation. What affected me with this process, however, was that as I turned the page, on the other side of the page would be an unanticipated underlined passage from the markings I made earlier. Discovering this, I decided to begin writing out the emergent passages to see what developed. A poetic form began to establish, where the content of the poems were sometimes in contrast to or in-line with the original author's content, while other generated poems conveyed something entirely new and different.

Here are some of the poetic, structural guidelines that began to emerge:

• Punctuation and lines were kept in the same format as found in the original text.
• If the underlining on both sides of the page overlapped, the sections were not used.
• Underlined sections that were blank on the opposite side of the paper created stanza breaks within the poem.

Compiled here on this website is a collection of nearly all of these discovered poems. I see this book not as a gathering of "found" poems, but instead I see these poems as text that was "finding" me. I managed to activate the text by choosing what I found to be significant in a given written work, but what was finding me were the poems themselves. They existed on the other end of my information grabbing (underlining), and allowed for a new, suggestive read.





Written / compiled by: Robert Chase Heishman
Book design by: Anthony Foster