Found Poems

Abby Steketee
October 2023

These found poems, or centos, are from my experimental poetry project, On the Loom. I invite the reader to contemplate ideas that span art, and science, and being.

When the poems began emerging, I wasn’t very familiar with found poems, or centos. It wasn’t until after I’d arranged the poems together that I came across Mornings Like This: Found Poems by Annie Dillard, and Found Poems by Bern Porter, and (my favorite) Nets by Jen Bervin.

On the Loom is different from those books in several ways: For one thing, each poem is a cento with at least two voices. For another, each poem is preceded by a narrative paragraph about the speakers.

The lines of each poem were produced by others—by poets, astronomers, physicists, ethnologists, biologists, philosophers, chemists, astronauts, polymaths; by Pulitzer Prize winners and Nobel laureates; by soldiers and doctors and mothers. Each poem is a combination of extant texts from different sources, one from a published poem; the other—indicated by bold font—is text from a non-poetic source.

Punctuated Equilibrium:
Evolution with Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, and Matsuo Basho and Robert Hass

Matsuo Basho, a 17th century Japanese poet of samurai descent, is often called the greatest master of haiku. Basho’s haiku have been translated by many writers, including former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass. An essential feature of haiku is kireji, a “cutting word” that functions a bit like punctuation—a dash, perhaps—to create a break or pause in the poem. In their seminal 1972 paper “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould introduced an alternative to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin theorized that evolution occurs through an accumulation of small changes that transpire gradually over a very long time. In contrast, Eldredge and Gould hypothesized that evolution happens in short bursts—or isolated episodes—of intense speciation sandwiched between long periods of little or no change.

The history of life…
The old pond
is not one of stately unfolding, but a story of…
a frog jumps in,
rapid and episodic events of speciation.
sound of water.

………

Sources:

Eldredge, Niles, and Gould, Stephen J. “Punctuated equilibria: An alternative to phyletic gradualism.” Geography, 1972, pp. 82-115.
Hass, Robert. The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa. Ecco, 1994, p. 18.
“Matsuo Basho: Frog Haiku (32 Translations and One Commentary).” Bureau of Public Secrets, www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm.
“Basho.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/basho.
“Robert Hass.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rince-hass.

5 Percent, Nevertheless:
Matters with Natalie Batalha and Ada Limon

“Instructions on Not Giving Up” by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon was published by the Academy of American Poets in 2017. Astronomer and astrophysicist Natalie Batalha has spent much of her career, including recent work with her daughter who is also an astronomer, searching for exoplanets—planets outside our solar system. Batalha led the science team for NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope from 2011-2017 and identified Kepler 10b, the first confirmed rocky exoplanet. Her Facebook post about the percentages of different matters in the universe has been quoted widely on social media.

Your friendly reminder that More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
dark matter comprises of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
25 percent of almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
the mass energy their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
budget of the cosmos, sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
while dark energy comprises 70 percent, that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and the normal matter and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
that you and I are made of the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
is just the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
a wee 5 percent. growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
And it’s all connected to the strange idea of continuous living despite
by a cosmic web of the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
filamentary bridges that stretch I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
across millions of light years. unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
Carry on.

………

Sources:

Limon, Ada. “Instructions on Not Giving Up.” Academy of American Poets,  https://poets.org/poem/instructions-not-giving.
Chen, Sophia. “Mother-daughter duo work together to find new worlds.” Nature, 27 February 2023, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00580-6
Tippett, Krista, narrator. “Natalie Batalha: A Planetary Sense of Love.” On Being, May 20, 2019, onbeing.org/programs/a-planetary-sense-of-love-natalie-batalha.

Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions:
Forecasting with Edward Lorenz and William Carlos Williams

The twenty-second work in William Carlos Williams’ 1924 book Spring and All did not have a title. It’s now called “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz, in the last two sentences of his 1963 paper “The Predictability of Hydrodynamic Flow,” used a metaphor about the wing beat of a lone sea gull to summarize his discovery about atmospheric fluctuations and weather. Lorenz’s discovery became the basis for modern chaos theory. Nine years after the original paper, Lorenz updated the sea gull metaphor in the title of his presentation for the American Association for the Advancement of Science: “Predictability; Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” The edit to his presentation is why, in chaos theory, we now call the significant effects of seemingly insignificant happenings the “butterfly effect.”

One meteorologist remarked 


so much depends
upon

one flap of a sea gull’s wings 


a red wheel
barrow

would be enough to alter 


glazed with rain
water

the course of the weather

beside the white
chickens

forever

………

Sources:

Lorenz, Edward. “The Predictability of Hydrodynamic Flow.” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 25, no. 4, 1963, pp. 409-432.
Lorenz, Edward. “Predictability; Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” American Association for the Advancement of Science, 139th Meeting, 29 December 1972.
Dizikes, Peter. “When the Butterfly Effect Took Flight.” MIT News Magazine, February 2011. www.technologyreview.com/2011/02/22/196987/when-the-butterfly-effect-took-flight.
Williams, Carlos Williams. “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Selected Poems, edited by Charles Tomlinson, New Directions, 1985, p. 56

Open Hands:
Revelation with Gerty Cori and Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov, at the age of five, proclaimed that she would be a writer. She followed through: “Living” is a poem in her 1983 Poems of Denise Levertov, 1960-1967. Likewise, Czech-American biochemist Gerty Cori experienced an early calling and decided to pursue medicine at age 16. Years later, in 1947, Cori became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. She shared the prize with her husband, Carl, for her role in discovering the process of cellular energy and release. It was only after she received the Nobel that she was finally promoted to rank of professor at the University of Washington Medical School. What Cori—persevering through well-documented gender discrimination—discovered about how the human body functions transformed the study of biology. Cori talked about her work in 1952 on Edward Murrow’s radio show “This I believe.” 



The unforgotten moments…
The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.

…after years of plodding work…
The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.

…the veil over nature’s secret seems suddenly to lift…
A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily

…what was dark and chaotic appears…
moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.

…in a clear and beautiful light and pattern…
Each minute the last minute.

………

Sources:

Levertov, Denise. “Living.” Poems of Denise Levertov, 1960-1967. New Directions, 1983, p. 240.
“Denise Levertov.” Poetry Foundation. www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/denise-levertov.
“Gerty Cori Facts.” Nobel Prize Outreach AB, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1947/cori-gt/facts.
“Gerty Cori Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1947.” The Nobel Prize Women Who Changed Science, www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/gerty-cori.

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Abby Steketee teaches at Virginia Tech in the Department of Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise, where she earned her PhD in 2020. Before that, she was an award-winning collegiate swim coach with head coaching stints at Northwestern University and the University of Nevada, Reno. She still swims most days and sometimes posts handstands on Instagram @literallyupsidedown. She has published multiple studies in peer-reviewed science journals.