Ready-made Poetry

The idea of the "ready-made poetry" is to use texts that already exist, which become poems in their own right of after certain manipulations, as well as to document life experiences that usually remain outside the framework of poetry," says the author of the book Kārlis Vērdiņš

The collection of poems "Ready-made Poetry" (Gatavā dzeja) comprises texts created in a technique known in visual arts as "ready-made" which means equating finished everyday objects to works of art. The author has made use of texts circulating around us on a daily basis: user manuals, emails, web news, announcements and materials shared by Facebook users, as well as Google search results and snippets of administrative, scientific or journalistic texts. 

Kārlis Vērdiņš (1979) is a Latvian poet, literary theoretician, author of research papers, monographs, and six collections of poetry, as well as an editor of various publications. His poems have been included in various collections in English, as well as been translated into Lithuanian, Swedish, Czech, Polish, Slovenian, Basque, and other languages. One of his most touching poems "Come to Me" was listed by the experts at the Southbank Centre among 50 greatest modern love poems of our day.