SOURCE: Review of Mornings Like This: Found Poems, in Hudson Review, Vol. XLVIII, No. 4, Winter, 1996, pp. 663-71.

In the excerpt below, Haines argues that Dillard's experimentations in Mornings Like This raise some disturbing questions about sources.

When I first looked through Annie Dillard's Mornings Like This and read her program notes, I was ready to set the book aside as a stunt and not worth serious attention. Subsequent reading has, to an extent, modified that impression. The book is subtitled Found Poems. The lines, as quoted throughout, are taken from various prose texts—from an eighth grade English text, from Van Gogh's Letters, a Boy Scout Handbook, etc.—and, according to Ms. Dillard, arranged in such a way as to simulate a poem originating with a single author. In her "Author's Note" she says of the poems, "Their sentences come from the books named. I lifted them. Sometimes...