on imitation (& round-up)
Hi & happy December!
I’m back & with a whole lot of stuff for you. If you subscribe, please open this in another tab if you want to read through to the end—it’s too long for email!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
Substacks to subscribe to
Things to buy
Books to read
What I’m reading
Quotations
On imitation
Tweets
Housekeeping:
(1) As always:
I’m selling 5 books for $30 to raise funds for The West Review’s contributors. Free shipping. You can tell me what you’re looking for or let me surprise you.
(2) I have poems out!
Here’s one that was just published in Gordon Square Review.
& I finally got the print edition of the newest Southeast Review, which includes two of my poems. You can read them here:
(3) &, for editors, ‘tis (‘twas?) the season for nominating texts for Pushcart Prizes!
I nominated these five gorgeous poems:
(4) Finally, the newest issue of The West Review came out this week.
It features some really talented writers & artists, plus I talk about four books I read this year & loved.
And, because it’s nearing the end of the year, I’m inclined to round-up (v.) a little more than I do already. That said…
Substacks to subscribe to:
If anyone else celebrates the holidays with consummerism (mood), here are a few little things that I love:
Books I loved this year (and gushed about in TWR!):
What I’m reading:
What I read last week:
Mechanism of Erect Posture, Rachel Gontijo Araujo
THE NAMEABLE: ON EXPERIMENTAL WRITING, Eugene Lim
MAPPING: NOTES ON A POETIC PRACTICE, Megan Kaminski
What I’m reading now:
Safe Space, Jos Charles
Quotations:
People talk about writing as if it could be something other than the immediacy of desire, the breast bone, the plexus.
-Rachel Gontijo Araujo, “Mechanism of Erect Posture”
And for some time now, I have been obsessed with this idea that writing is an exercise in anatomy where desire is fated not only to manifest itself on the page by erection but also to indicate that body is not a space of origin but a territory that disorients.
-Rachel Gontijo Araujo, “Mechanism of Erect Posture”
If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this: above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy.
-Nietzsche
There is no such thing as single identities and/or single selves. We are multiple from before, already. We are multiple, maybe, in the very first instances of loss.
-Dawn Lundy Martin
How impossible to stare at a person straight on. No matter light’s angle.
What poor moon deserves this night,
drab corset of grief.
I know there's a harmonica
somewhere, some chicken
feathers and cord grass that might hold
the dark apart from the body.
But tonight the twilight tethers its husk
to October's horizon and bears down, until even here
at the edge of this concrete field,
epic maze of rust and chain link,
there is nowhere to go
that isn't slowly subtracting its ache,
each long white hour,
from decades of unribboning.
What experimental literature has the potential to do then is to name and subvert or destroy the many literary, psychological, and social ideologies that are hidden from us.
-Eugene Lim
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
-Audre Lorde
We name the experimental, as we name any quality, moment, school, or movement in literature, in large part from the vantage point of today. So what appears to be doctrinaire, even hegemonic, from here and now, might well have had to fight to make its space in its time. We now take for granted Langston Hughes’s forging poetic form from jazz and the blues. There have been so many practitioners in the jazz/blues poem mode, from the sublime to the ridiculous, that its status as a form is now a given. But when a young Hughes was making those first poems in the 1920s, the forms, the vessels that brought those musics into the muscle and bone of poems, simply did not exist. Hughes was a radical innovator who made poems that managed to sound natural, inevitable, and almost artless, in their very artfulness.
-Elizabeth Alexander
I couldn’t help thinking about areas of the arts that attach terms like “avant-garde” or “experimental” to themselves — about how so many young writers aspire to be “avant-garde” by trying to mirror the behaviors and artistic mannerisms of past, often European, artists. … So what “avant-garde” or “experimental” means to me, when I hear it today, specifically within institutional settings (i.e., from people who have some measure of access to institutional arts in the US), is precisely the opposite of the words’ meanings.
-Alexis Clements
How desire is a thing I might die for. Longing a well, / a long dark throat.
-Leila Chatti
My body is filled by a summer of lust / and I can’t tell the difference between desire / longing, and all the sweet speeches / love hoards.
-Linda Gregg
I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkin, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel that when we die and become part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
-Willa Cather, My Ántonia
I wanted / nothing more than to / be worth / my name, its flight of / soot and / salt across the page. […] I wanted / nothing / more than to fulfill my name.
-Jade Cho, “Twelve Chinese Confessions, 1963”
how you come to monster / the midnight from me / how you magic a tombstone / from my throat // how you brutal the alphabet / of my name.
-Mick Powell, “u be a fang I be a body”
when i hear your sob stories about how poetry is awful, how poetry is useless / i want you to get the fuck out of my way / i want you to get the fuck out of poetry’s way
-Jennifer Tamayo, “Guatavita, La Dorada”
i believe in the power of nothing
because first, fuck power
and second, could i coronate myself with a glowing nothing
i would do it forever, i am beautiful in the space of nothing in which I burn
the cavity of me outlined in pink droopy leaflets, scorched
from the inside out. don’t touch me ㅤㅤㅤㅤi’m nothing.
-Jennifer Tamayo, “Guatavita, La Dorada”
On imitation:
I think imitation, in poetry, has value—especially for those just starting out. It allows writers to try different forms, different tones, and different syntax. It’s a mode of experimentation—and experimenting can help one to better understand how their own poetics fit into the broader literary landscape.
And—since so much of the ~writing process~ comes from time spent reading—often what spurs a poem might be something else we read. (If reading isn’t an essential part of your poetic practice, it should be. Because it certainly is for the poets you admire.)
I think that “inspiration” is distinct from “imitation.” With imitations, the inspiration is obvious to people who know the older poem—or to anyone, if they were to look at the two poems side-by-side. If that’s the case, it’s polite (or perhaps your duty) to add an after Poet’s Name as an epigraph.
For example, I have a poem coming out in Ploughshares this month whose form was inspired by Jericho Brown’s “The Tradition.” With its repetition of plant/flower names, the influence is clear, so the epigraph reads after Jericho Brown.
Catherine Chen’s “Performance Theory” doesn’t include this epigraph—but maybe it should (I think yes, but I’ll let you decide for yourself).
Layli Long Soldier’s collection Whereas came out in 2017 and uses its titular word as anaphora, with poems that look almost like legal documents, appropriating this sometimes legal term (reference) within her work.
Of course, Layli Long Soldier doesn’t have ~ownership~ over the word “whereas,” but since
her poem/book is the best-known example using it in repitition and
since Whereas came out in 2017 and “Performance Theory” in 2018,
Chen was likely influenced by the older poem.
Read them both here:
What do you think? Should Chen have included after Layli Long Soldier as an epigraph?
What about this poem—recently published in Poetry—that also begins each line with “whereas”?
You might think about this in your own work, too. I’ve talked about showing your work before. I don’t think a poem becomes any less meaningful if it tracks/references its influences. And it helps prevent hurt (or angry) feelings, much of the time.
(A note: there are so many other poems I could have used here as examples {including a few of my own!}—this is just the most recent one I encountered & had on-hand & what got me thinking about the broader topic.)
Tweets:
That’s all for today. Have a good weekend!
-DB
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