Josh Wallaert’s surviving poems turn Noah Webster’s 1828 Dictionary of the English Language into found poetry about anatomy, illness, speech, pain, historical definition, selection, and the strange authority of reference language. The archive preserves two titles, Webster’s Body and Physician’s Advice. Both works are constructed from dictionary entries whose original practical purpose changes when they are removed from alphabetical order and placed inside poetic sequence.
Wallaert’s method makes selection central. Mouth, lip, nose, finger, lungs, nightmare, itch, pain, and the historical definition of “ouch” become a portrait assembled from lexicographic fragments. The words remain definitions while their proximity creates narrative, tone, bodily vulnerability, and dark humor.
Webster’s Body
Webster’s Body gathers definitions for parts and functions of the body. The poem moves through mouth, lips, nose, fingers, and lungs, creating a figure through dictionary language.
A dictionary isolates terms so that each can be explained independently. Wallaert’s sequence reconnects the entries. Once mouth stands beside lip, nose, finger, and lungs, the body begins to emerge through accumulation.
The archive’s guide to experimental poetry provides a broad context for found language, appropriation, conceptual selection, procedural composition, and writing that transforms existing documents through arrangement.
Noah Webster and historical language
Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary belongs to a historical project of defining American English. Its entries preserve vocabulary, scientific assumptions, social habits, and rhetorical styles from another period.
Wallaert’s poems make that historical texture audible. Definitions can sound clinical, ornate, surprising, or comic to a contemporary reader because the explanatory language belongs to an earlier moment.
The broader field of American poetry offers a useful context for writers who treat national language, historical documents, reference works, vernacular change, and inherited textual authority as literary materials.
Mouth and speech
The mouth begins the body sequence as aperture, organ of voice, and route for food. This dual function immediately links language with bodily necessity.
Speech requires anatomy. Voice emerges through breath, lips, tongue, mouth, nose, and lungs; language is therefore inseparable from the physical structures that produce sound.
The poem makes that embodiment visible by letting the dictionary describe speech as an anatomical process.
Jonathan Pickering offers a neighboring route through poetry where pronunciation, spelling, sound, linguistic authority, and the physical experience of reading become central concerns.
Lips and articulation
The definition of lips emphasizes their role as covering, muscular structure, and organ essential to particular articulations. The dictionary treats speech as coordinated bodily work.
Inside the poem, the lips also bring associations that the reference entry does not need to discuss directly: expression, intimacy, silence, kissing, injury, and the visible edge of speech.
Found poetry allows those associations to become active while the source language remains formally factual.
Nose and beauty
Webster’s definition of the nose combines smell, voice, tears, respiration, and facial beauty. A single anatomical entry therefore carries several bodily systems at once.
Its inclusion changes the poem’s tone because scientific description suddenly includes an aesthetic judgment. Beauty enters beside ducts, air, smell, and speech.
This reveals how dictionaries contain cultural values as well as definitions. A reference work records assumptions about bodies through the language it chooses.
Finger and instrument
The finger is described through grasping, seizing, holding, joints, and pointed form. Webster’s definition makes the hand mechanical and purposive.
Inside a poem, the finger also connects with writing, touch, work, gesture, pointing, and the physical handling of books. The entry therefore opens beyond its original explanatory purpose.
The site’s broad guide to poetry provides a useful context for how image, sequence, voice, selection, and concrete detail can make ordinary language carry additional associations.
Lights and lungs
The historical use of “lights” for animal lungs gives the sequence one of its most striking linguistic moments. The familiar word “lights” suddenly refers to breathing organs.
Archaic vocabulary makes language itself feel historical and unstable. A word that now carries one dominant set of meanings once participated in another anatomical system.
This semantic change demonstrates why old dictionaries are rich poetic sources: they preserve meanings that contemporary usage has partly forgotten.
Physician’s Advice
Physician’s Advice shifts from anatomy toward symptoms, discomfort, and bodily crisis. Nightmare, itch, pain, and “ouch” form a compact catalogue of suffering.
The title creates an implied medical scene, yet the poem consists of reference definitions. Advice emerges through classification rather than direct instruction.
Christine Hamm offers another route through poetry where bodily vulnerability, injury, illness, domestic life, surreal pressure, and inherited cultural forms create concentrated narrative fields.
Nightmare and medical history
The historical definition of nightmare describes pressure on the breast and links the experience to digestion or a loaded stomach. Contemporary understandings of nightmare usually emphasize dream and fear, so the older medical explanation feels unexpectedly physical.
This difference reveals changing knowledge. Dictionaries preserve theories that later science revises or abandons.
Wallaert’s selection turns that change into poetic tension: the entry remains precise within its own historical logic while sounding strange to a later reader.
Itch and friction
The definition of itch describes pustules, irritation, and the inclination toward friction. The language is clinical while the experience is intensely bodily.
Friction also becomes a useful formal idea. Found poetry creates friction among source purpose, historical language, contemporary reading, and poetic arrangement.
The reader feels the distance between an impersonal definition and the discomfort it describes.
Pain and classification
The entry for pain attempts to classify a vast spectrum of bodily suffering through causes such as pressure, tension, spasm, violence, and deranged function.
Definition tries to contain pain inside general language. The experience itself varies radically from body to body.
This gap gives the poem philosophical force. Reference language seeks stable categories while pain remains immediate, subjective, and difficult to transfer.
Gina Myers offers another contemporary route through poetry where illness, bodily endurance, labor, medical systems, and ordinary life remain closely connected.
Ouch
The historical definition of “ouch” as the blow given by a boar’s tusk gives the sequence a startling ending. Contemporary readers are more likely to encounter “ouch” as an exclamation of pain.
The older noun therefore turns a familiar sound into an event involving animal force and bodily impact.
That semantic surprise condenses Wallaert’s entire method: dictionary history makes ordinary language strange through meanings that have shifted or disappeared.
Selection as authorship
Found poetry raises a central question about authorship because the words originate elsewhere. Wallaert’s creative decisions appear through choice, order, title, juxtaposition, and the frame created around the source.
Selection determines the body that emerges. Another set of Webster entries would create another poem entirely.
Adriana Grant offers a neighboring practice where selection, found language, visual composition, movement, and juxtaposition transform ordinary materials into poetic structure.
Dictionary as archive
A historical dictionary is more than a list of words. It records changing knowledge, cultural values, scientific theories, usage, social assumptions, and earlier semantic worlds.
Wallaert’s poems activate that archive by bringing selected entries into relation. Anatomy becomes cultural history; medical description becomes literary voice; obsolete meaning becomes comic and philosophical surprise.
The site’s overview of modern poetry provides a broad frame for conceptual writing, documentary reuse, found text, archival practice, and poems assembled from nonliterary sources.
Reading Josh Wallaert
Wallaert’s surviving work establishes a poetics of lexicography, anatomy, illness, historical language, conceptual selection, semantic change, and documentary transformation. Webster’s dictionary becomes both source and stage.
Within contemporary poetry, these poems offer a focused example of found-text practice. Their originality emerges through arrangement: definitions written for reference begin creating bodies, tones, histories, and unexpected relations.
The strongest route into Wallaert is to notice semantic drift. Watch “lights” become lungs and “ouch” become a boar’s blow; notice how mouth, lip, nose, finger, and breath assemble a body from separate entries. The poems reveal history already embedded inside ordinary words.