Poetic Archeology

Mark O’Connor’s essay “Poetic Archeology: Excavating Found Text to Create Word-and-Image Poems” was selected by the T&W Magazine editorial board as a finalist for the 2025 Bechtel Prize. The Bechtel Prize is awarded for an essay describing a creative writing teaching experience, project, or activity that demonstrates innovation in creative writing instruction.

The Bechtel Prize is named for Louise Seaman Bechtel, who was an editor, author, collector of children’s books, and teacher. She was the first person to head a juvenile book department at an American publishing house. As such, she took children’s literature seriously, helped establish the field, and was a tireless advocate for the importance of literature in kids’ lives.This award honors her legacy. Learn more about the Bechtel Prize here.

When I announce the poetry unit to my college-level Intro to Creative Writing class, there are only two responses—audible expressions of “yes!” from the students who love poetry and louder groans from everybody else. The “yes!” students have read and written a lot of poetry in high school. They are delighted. The groaners are often unfamiliar with poetry, or actively hate it and are resistant (politely) to the very notion that poetry can be interesting or beautiful, or—god forbid—that they will have to write it. This second cohort is my challenge each semester. 

The class is comprised of about 30 students, evenly divided among majors, non-majors, and the just-plain curious. As a foundational course we cover fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry in preparation for upper-level, single-genre workshops. The fiction and creative nonfiction units always proceed swimmingly. The poetry unit, however, demands a more careful consideration of my methods and an approach that can overcome the naysayers’ stubborn aversion to poetry. 

I begin the unit by passing around a copy of Tom Phillips’ amazing text-and-image novel, A Humument, and then show his website. The website contains scans of every page of the pallid 1892 novel A Human Document, which Phillips purchased at a London bookstall for a few pounds. Most importantly, next to each scanned page of the 1892 original, Phillips presents his radical transformations of these same pages, side-by-side comparisons in which he has given new life to the original text by isolating and then connecting words, phrases, and sentences and profusely illustrating each page, in essence, creating a new novel, A Humument. His title is also an act of creative excavation, a neologism made by removing several letters from the original title. 

Every page pops with color: sometimes the illustrations are elaborate scenes related to the found text, sometimes they are simple lines and patterns. Moving between the original novel and Phillips’ transformed pages is a profound reading and viewing experience. The print version is relatively small (5” x 7”) but hefty, clocking in at more than 300 color pages. In one’s hand it feels substantial, and upon opening to any page, it reveals itself as a gorgeous explosion of text and color, each page seemingly distinct from the previous and subsequent pages but all tied in with an ongoing narrative. It is art in your hand. The online version allows for even greater access, giving us the ability to zoom in on individual pages or trace an image or metaphor over several pages. After showing the class a few pages, I briefly discuss A Humument, locating its origins in cut-up and found poetry experiments that can be traced back to the Dadaist movement of the 1820s, but also noting its status as a unique work of art that incorporates Phillips’ background in drawing and painting. 

“The good news,” I tell my students, “is that in a moment we’re all going to use A Humument as inspiration for finding poetry in these,” as I gesture towards a stack of books on my desk. The books are intentionally varied, including one or two obviously old books, all sourced from second-hand stores and garage sales. Few of the books are “literary.” I include at least one canonical novel, but there are also travel books, textbooks about economics and composition theory, cookbooks, romance and sci-fi novels, and even the occasional gardening book. Some of the most wonderful discoveries result from students finding poems in non-literary source material. 

Holding up one of the books, I say, “I want each of you to select a page at random and rip it out,” which I demonstrate, often to loud gasps.

At this point, the poetry lovers are absolutely on board because they get to write poetry. The poetry haters are suspicious but curious, too. The fun is about to begin. 

Holding up one of the books, I say, “I want each of you to select a page at random and rip it out,” which I demonstrate, often to loud gasps. I suspect many of them have been warned against damaging books over the years by well-meaning parents, teachers, or librarians. It is a powerful prohibition I am asking them to overcome, but with an honorable goal. 

I continue. “Do this for each of the books being passed around until you have one page from every book.” 

As the students begin ripping pages, tentatively at first, I walk around encouraging destruction. Dropping a pencil off at each desk, I say, “Once you have all your pages before you, take your pencil and begin circling interesting words, phrases, and sentences, on both sides of each torn-out page, just like Tom Phillips. This is the excavation part. You are seeking the interesting, the beautiful, the strange and profound, the words that strike you among these lines, finding your poetry.” 

I set them to task. And sit. 

Inevitably the room grows wonderfully silent as the students begin using their pencils to mark a great word here, and then a few lines down, a great phrase there. After a few minutes, I see a student shyly presenting a page to a classmate, who reads their discoveries and nods, and both eagerly return to work. One guy in back will inevitably discover a salacious word and slide the page to his buddy, who’ll quietly laugh. A few students are immediately transfixed, intently circling and erasing, brows furrowed, as they find the words, as they make meaning. 

It is fascinating to watch them create art. 

I give them about 15 minutes to find as many poems as they can. Then I ask them to silently read their discoveries, critically examining their found poems among the detritus of these torn out pages, with the goal of winnowing them down to the best two poems. The last direction for this step is to share and discuss these poems with their neighbor, with the goal of further narrowing, choosing one poem as the most interesting. 

And then I interrupt to let them know there is one more step that day. I distribute a handout and two manila folders to each student. The handout contains sets of companion poems—William Blake’s “The Nurse’s Song/Innocence” and “The Nurse’s Song/Experience”; Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” paired with Langston Hughes’ “I, Too”; and Sylvia Plath’s “Blackberrying” paired with Seamus Heaney’s “Blackberry-Picking.” (Any type of companion poems can be used.) We gloss the poems, drawing out the connections between them, unpacking what makes them work, why they are together. For many of the students, this is their first exposure to these wonderful poets, and I enjoy helping them see the many ways in which these poems are kin. 

Before dismissing them (this assignment may cover two class periods, depending on the length of the class) I offer a few more instructions, “For homework I want you to write a companion poem for each of your two favorite found poems. Your companion poems should be in dialogue in some way with your two found poems, like the samples from class. At the end of this exercise you will have four poems in total, two found poems and two accompanying companion poems.” 

And there’s one final requirement: “I also want you to illustrate your two found poems on the original torn out pages, just like Tom Phillips did. Use markers, colored pencils, paints, etc. Whatever you have on hand. And then, on the left side of each folder, affix one of your illustrated found poems; on the right side of the same folder, print out and staple the accompanying companion poem you wrote. And please bring both folders back to the next class.” I show them several completed student projects as models, like the example below.

The next session, when students return with their completed projects, I break them into small groups to share their work and then choose one person to read (and show!) their poems to the rest of the class. The selection criteria are entirely up to each group, as I want them to begin developing a language and aesthetic for discussing poetry. Sometimes the group choices are based on the students’ art. But most of the time the choices are based on the interplay of the texts and images, the combinatorial magic this exercise encourages, particularly among the reluctant writers. 

The students in each group whose work was not chosen explain their selection criteria to the class, the beginnings of developing a class-wide rubric for reading and evaluating poetry. The lucky poets share their work in a kind of mini public reading, which is celebratory and great fun. 

This past fall, a creative writing major who excavated her poem from Tess of the d’Urbervilles, titled her work from the first words she isolated, “The Curate of Self.” Here’s her poem: 

The curate of the self
twitching every day
I had to neglect the great kin
Gather love
resentful and bitter.

–– Ryn D.

It is illustrated starkly with a blue and black background and delicate silver hearts floating over the words. I am struck by how her speaker limns the complicated boundaries of love and the pull of family. Of course, it made me intensely curious about how she would link her companion poem. 

That poem reads:

I take your bitter love & I swallow it
& pretend it is enough to sustain.
my mind thinks of another,
someone whose twitching stirs
& rattles the ghost inside.
the small bird cage.
she is no mother, & I am no child,
but yet I crave her resentful hold.

–– Ryn D.

The intersection of longing and absence here, sparked from the word “twitching” found in Tess, allows the two poems to resonate with desire, both physical and psychic. The loss that great desire sometimes causes (“I had to neglect the great kin”) is justified in the beautiful and painful last line, “yet I crave her resentful hold.” The combination of the two poems, and the accompanying image, makes it all work together beautifully.

In this same class, the found poem by a non-major was unearthed from Bill McKibben’s Reader and is illustrated with a large cross. Untitled, it reads:

America
echoes no
body and soul
blood.

–– Jack P.

His companion poem, “Apostasy,” extends the political nature of the work he discovered in McKibben’s environmental text and crosses it with a religious supplication. His vivid Jeremiad pleads:

oh father above me
I have to spill blood in your name,
blood that suffocates,
my body, my neighbor, my civilization
And free me, Lord
from the sins of your acolyte
from your neglection when
I needed you most
Hallowed be my own soul
and humbly I pray,
will you return to me? Or is my fate in purgatory
as your Kingdom burns in your name?

–– Jack P.

I am moved by the agony of this speaker. As the poem moves from the macro assessment of the United States to the cri de cœur of a single speaker in the intimate questioning of God, I wonder how much of this comes from his awareness that he is now of draft age in our combustible times. That these poems were produced by a non-major is deeply satisfying. That the poems did not exist before he began tearing out pages from discarded books offers me hope that I can overcome the poetry-averse student. 

This almost fail-proof exercise has been used with visiting high-school students and can easily be scaled up for advanced writing classes. As most students do not know about A Humument, that part of the exercise alone is a revelation. For creative writing majors it offers an assignment that speaks to their passions while adding the challenge of illustrating their work. For the reluctant writers it is a way of cajoling them into realizing that they too can write poetry. 

The companion poems, both historic and contemporary, also expose the students to great poetry without being heavy-handed. The entire project is like easing them into the deep end of the pool but with all sorts of metaphoric flotation devices in place, the linguistic lightness of Whitman and Hughes, Plath and Heaney, et al., the buoyant beauty of Tom Phillips’ novel, all supported by group work and discovery. It is a low-stakes assignment with remarkable results. And at the end of the day, the students each possess a self-created artifact that is theirs to keep.