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Imitation: issue summary and index of imitative models
by Dave Bonta and Siona van Dijk
Editing this issue was a delight. If you’re a regular reader, we hope you’ve enjoyed watching it unfold. Among the things it taught us: the distance between jest and reverence is sometimes not very great; imitations of one author in the style of another are more common than we thought; “difficult” and experimental writers attract almost as many imitators as the more accessible ones, perhaps because of the challenge they present; poems that are themselves imitations tend to attract further imitations (though we didn’t often choose the results for publication); and you all really, really like Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
Well, O.K., we sort of expected that last result. And it wasn’t a big surprise that we received multiple imitations of Hemingway, Dickinson and Plath, either. It makes sense that the most idiosyncratic authors and artists would be among the most often imitated: creative people are attracted to otherness, and putting on a mask that’s strikingly different from one’s own face brings out the inner child. Playfulness or the desire to improve one’s craft aren’t the only impulses at work in this issue, though. Sometimes an imitation responds to or expands upon a point made in the original work. And sometimes, too, parody seems like the best way to critique some lamentable tendency of the imitated author: Wordsworth’s sexism, Richard Lovelace’s fatuousness and Dylan Thomas’ failure to take his own advice about dying were all pilloried in this issue, for example.
At the other extreme, we were charmed that a few contributors went so far as to dedicate their pieces to the authors whose styles they imitated. There’s something touching and very human about the impulse to engage dead authors and artists in conversation. In some cases, of course, the imitated authors are still with us, so there’s a chance they’ll read these imitations. What must it be like to encounter this kind of tribute to the power of one’s work?
A few of the contributors to this issue are working on book-length collections in the imitative mode. We were pleased to be able to excerpt such ambitious projects as the collaborative “Odes of Opposition” by Lisa McCool-Grime and Nancy Flynn, Marilyn Annucci‘s manuscript After Her, and DeWitt Clinton‘s poem-by-poem response to Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Chinese.
It’s interesting to note the relative proportion of male to female authors and artists among the imitative models, which movements and national literatures are represented, and so forth. Rather than continue to try to summarize the issue, though, we thought it might be more useful to compile a complete index of imitative models.
What struck you most about this issue? Feel free to leave your own assessments in the comments.
The following links go to imitations in the issue, not to the original works or artists/authors.
Adcock, Fleur (“The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers“)
Agee, James (A Death in the Family)
Albertí, Rafael (Sobre los ángeles)
Ashbery, John (general)
Atwood, Margaret (“Heart“)
Bacon, Francis (Self-portrait, 1972)
Balthus (telegram sent to the Tate Gallery, 1968)
Bishop, Elizabeth (“One Art“)
Bobrowksi, Johannes (“Fishing port“)
Borges, Jorge Luis (“Limits“)
Breton, Andre (“Free Union“)
Bukowski, Charles (general)
Canaletto (general)
Cisneros, Sandra (“You Bring Out the Mexican In Me“)
Collins, Billy (general)
cummings, e.e. (general)
Dickinson, Emily (“I heard a fly buzz when I died…“)
Drummond de Andrade, Carlos (“In the Middle of the Road“)
Eliot, T.S. (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“)
Gass, William (“In the Heart of the Heart of the Country“)
Ginsberg, Allen (general)
Glück, Louise (general)
Gregg, Linda (general)
Hardy, Thomas (“The Convergence of the Twain“)
Hass, Robert (“Meditation at Lagunitas“)
Hemingway, Ernest (general)
Hesiod (general)
Heynen, Jim (short stories)
Hopper, Edward (general)
Hughes, Ted (general)
Jarnot, Lisa (“Poem Beginning with a Line by Frank Lima“; “Ye white Antarctic birds“)
Keats, John (general)
Larkin, Philip (“Vers de Societé“)
Levine, Philip (general)
Lissaint, Carvens (“Tell Them“)
Lovelace, Richard (“To Lucasta, Going to the Wars“)
McBryde, Ian (Slivers)
Melville, Herman (Moby Dick: 1, 2)
Moore, Lenard D. (“Postcard to an Ecologist“)
Olson, Charles (The Maximus Poems)
Oppen, George (general)
Owen, Wilfred (“Dulce et Decorum Est“)
Pamuk, Orhan (My Name Is Red)
Parker, Dorothy (general)
Picasso, Pablo (Self-portrait / Autoportrait, 1972)
Plath, Sylvia (various; “You’re”: 1, 2)
P’o, Su Tung (“The Terrace in the Snow“)
Pound, Ezra (general)
Pulp magazines from the 1930s (Westerns)
Queneau, Raymond (Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes: 1, 2)
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (Self Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar)
Rexroth, Kenneth (One Hundred Poems from the Chinese)
Rich, Adrienne (“Final Notations“)
Rilke, Rainer Maria (“Archaic Torso of Apollo“)
Roethke, Theodore (“Cuttings (later)“)
Ryan, Kay (general)
Šalamun, Tomaž (“I Smell Horses in Poland“)
Shakespeare, William (Hamlet soliloquy; Sonnet 130)
Siken, Richard (Crush)
Smart, Christopher (“Jubilate Agno“)
Stein, Gerturde (general)
Stern, Gerald (“Spring“)
Stevens, Wallace (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird“)
Stevenson, Robert Louis (“My Shadow“)
Strand, Mark (“Keeping Things Whole“)
Thomas, Dylan (general)
Twain, Mark (general)
Uelsmann, Jerry (general)
Van Gogh, Vincent (Self-Portrait, September 1889)
Vasarely, Victor (general)
Vermeer, Johannes (Girl with a Pearl Earring)
Weston, Edward (Pepper, 1930)
Whitman, Walt (“Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun“)
Wilbur, Richard (The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems)
Williams, William Carlos (“The Widow’s Lament in Springtime“; general)
Woloch, Cecelia (“Blazon“)
Wordsworth, William (various)
Imitation: Table of Contents
In the Middle of the Bench by Joe Zealberg
Lucasta Responds to Richard by Janet McCann
Imitation Self by Natalie d’Arbeloff
from Collected Poems by Stuart Barnes
The Love Song of J. Alfred Proofreader by Donna Levine Gershon
The Hive: A Parody by Robbi Nester
not a Bukowski poem by Jim Murdoch
Final Notations: Extramarital by Marilyn Annucci
One More: After Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” by Pamela Johnson Parker
Alone with a Toad by Corinne Manning
Ginsberg, Like You, I Feel the Pull by Julene Tripp Weaver
JUBILATE PUERIS (Christopher Smart gratias) by Ann E. Michael
Olé by Judith Terzi
Homage to Weston by Karen Greenbaum-Maya
Fall by Mike Puican
Pencil & Sand Dance by Kate Marchetto
Channeling Gertrude by Tom Konyves
Virginia Roots by Eric M. R. Webb
You Bring Out the Punjabi In Me by Preeti Kaur
Odes of Opposition by Lisa McCool-Grime and Nancy Flynn
The Lyric Angel by Robin Davidson
Sound Catcher by Karen Stromberg
Lace by Carol Dorf
New York Bridges by Joseph Harker
Meditation at the Metering Lights on the Bay Bridge by Susan Gubernat
False at First Light by Kerry Harwin
Homage to Victor Vasarely by Steve Wing
Not an Ode to Oppen by Cecilia Pinto
Bring Your Own Water by Marty McConnell
Two Poems After Hesiod by Brett Foster
Old Torso at the City Museum by Paul Dickey
Father at Night by Barbara G.S. Hagerty
The Fugitive Light by Marly Youmans
Keeping Things Real by Zackary Sholem Berger
Keats in America; Ode to Wilderness by Alex Cigale
Eating and Other Disorders by Lucia Galloway
In the Heart of “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” — A Tribute to William Gass by Theresa Williams
Chigger Boom and the Night the Devil Broke Loose by Tom Sheehan
Blazon by Barbara G.S. Hagerty
I Smell Buffalo in Cambodia by Adam Aitken
Wordsworth Trilogy by Denise Provost
Reading Billy Collins in the Bath by Hugh McMillan
A Hamlet Soliloquy by Dorothy Parker by Carolyn Moore
Art Crime Bulletin by Cecelia Chapman and Jeff Crouch
After Cycling Near the Lake Inside a Glassed-in Room I Open Su Tung P’o’s “The Terrace in the Snow” by DeWitt Clinton
O great maritime bears by Marie Marshall
A Lesson Learnt by Wendy Burtt
Hors d’Afrique (after Larkin’s Vers de Societé) by Irene Brown
Ezra Pound Reflects on the Los Angeles Riots, 1992 by Patricia L. Scruggs
we know most when we know nothing by Dana Guthrie Martin
Adcock Modulations (Symbolic, Fantastic, Historic, Personal) by Jon Stone
Dulce et Dotcom Est by Chris Clarke
Bigfoot Kept Lumberjack as Love Slave by Lou Amyx
L’image est sur le Mur by Shirley Brewer
Living With Maximus by Kir Jordan
Orphanage
(For Ian, Again)
Old enough to remember.
Your silence woke me.
Lights out. Nobody at home.
His hand got stuck in the postbox.
In the dream, you made me go to the front.
You can’t return what you stole.
Each heart, side by side with night.
He hunts himself.
Liquid from both ears.
Were there receipts for slaves?
The petals were bait.
I was untouchable; you were unreasonable.
A friend knows when to turn the lights out.
Briefly, wounds are touched.
Slim, rusty.
They themselves are proof.
Show me a pub with no fear…
A pool in the liver in which to drown.
It’s not my business, but it pays.
You’ll never sleep alone.
Nightmare: everyone stayed.
Atheists feel like bastards sometimes.
So many feet! So slowly!
We are all going home.
Again and again and again and a gain and…
In your dream, you were still alive.
In one night. All.
Inspired by the poetry of Ian McBryde, particularly his book of one-line poems, Slivers (Melbourne: Flat Chat Press, 2005).
Matt Hetherington is not a poet, but he writes poetry, and has so many sides he’s round. He lives around Melbourne, Australia and his last book of poetry was called I Think We Have (Small Change Press, 2007).
The Brood
by Rick Clark
In my veins, in my bones I feel it
—from “Cuttings (later),” with apologies to Theodore Roethke
The year is momentous,
I have checked the calendar:
Twenty-one years old, and thus
I look back on a life that meanders,
Ebbs away from me, like rain running off
Of rough roofs, to be muddily lost
Amidst an epoch of tender learning;
I grow old while still young, and yearning
For tokens signifying that I am now a man,
And better for it. Now, summer comes,
Bringing cicadas squirming past dams
Of ancient root and leaf and earth, from
Those palatial alcoves deep beneath my feet.
The wild things return, and sing, and sing
For just three new moons, and greet
The young as their time is ending.
Rick Clark is a 29-year-old writer living in Fairfax, Virginia. He is a previous winner of the George Mason Review Prize for Poetry for the poem “Eight Crows,” and is in the process of (finally) finishing a degree in Creative Writing at George Mason University.
Stop the presses: Death Has Last Word!
by Allen Speed
Don’t faint, but your long, cool glass of water
Is the ball-sweat of a burning saint.
In the hedgerows, in the markets, murder
And its oozy products are the gory norm.
Don’t think that like some shoulderless skink
You’ll blindly make off in the mud with your life;
Your only question is how death’s coming,
By spade or truck or flood or stoat or knife.
Stay up late, hysteria will fill you
With the natural world’s repulsive goos.
That’s not the oil furnace you hear thrumming,
Or the afterburn of last night’s booze,
But the bloody murmur of The Dire News
And its glowering editor, Ted Hughes.
Download the podcast (reading by Dave Bonta)
Allen Speed has poems published or forthcoming under this and other names in Chimaera, Literary Bohemian, Able Muse, Yellow Mama, and other venues.
Chases
Name me—a stone. With what rod shall we, branded among the any, inch out the Golgothic stunnings of our onliness? Washed sand lays sounded waves imbricate in soft scrolls, but when I prize out of those reef-shallow, solitary and galactic offices, conscripted and construed within the commas of the coved brine, the sculpt flesh vermillion of the anemone, bourned within a starry multitude of sting-inked quills shaded as the bottom waters cantering revelation, blends against my hunger’s flex and torsion of tongue, being its same tint and shade but flowered too with budded islands of salt and bitter, sweet triparted sensationings, dripping with undersea fatted unction: where in deeds are the mortal humilities of our doubting species flailing in the strew? Where, O coherence? Which is the land of the skull? Who fathers and gathers the papers ere the dead done souls lie wrapt in yellowed watery sub-archives? What darkened tongues lie tangled deep among the same moisted blood which paves Saul’s unblinding and writ road with the lain? Where withered the hortus and haruspex of our crossing? Caedmon’s fruit ripens the mind in its sackcloth of histories. Proteus of Lucian, my signature is straw bed and chowder: I am gone, bound to tell you, stitched to the milky nipple of the sea-worm’s feculent trapping, sounded to the hymn of the last incarnadine spurt, into this leathered library, where dust flows trailing along the oils. The meat of my mind leaps, undermined by its parodic radical, against its dart and kindred rope, white, whitely and wild, drenched till the humble last in another color. Figure me then, with my own skin’s ravel, ornated and loomed through the garment of a ghostly praying. O emptiness and socket! brined cauldron and caul calling out the wings of my neck-pulse! What god achieves the end within my carvings of this buoyant sepulchre? Death in the commas and death in the heave and brain of love. Fey, and away, rhetors. I, he’ll have spit on the voltage of the turn, all lines crossed, but yet the Hyperionical flame of friction unfriends my coinaged suns! I dive deep with the barbarous enrapting thing, sulphurous within it! Inscript no more of hermenutical nor nautical me. There is no time abandoned, nor none to be nursed within the whispers, if I am not time cast on the day’s dial, the hammered gold signatures and rhapsodes of threaded light.
after The Whale.
Theodore Worozbyt’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Image, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Quarterly West, Sentence, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly Online, Verse Daily and The Best American Poetry. His first book, The Dauber Wings, won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and his second, Letters of Transit, won the 2007 Juniper Prize. Scar Letters, a chapbook, is online at Beard of Bees Press [PDF]. Objectless Fragments, a new chapbook, is forthcoming from Apocryphal Text.
Living With Maximus
by Kir Jordan
I.
Maximus:
I, a bower bird
will build and build
this thatch grass hovel
everyone deserves something
to call their own? I ask
you, receive no reply
you have never known
placelessness
weave weave
I am time consumed in place
obsession I must make some
corner of some locale my own
I am no hunter-gatherer
have no bow, know nothing—
survival guides, mycology
conditioned, told to nest
know nothing of nesting either
II.
the shape of ship
need for container, vessel
fail-safe
need steel, will steal
am steeled and what
I have of place is stolen
having but passed these shores in brief I speak only impressionism
(I hate the impressionists)
this, nothing of light
I try to capture location
am revealed a curio shop, a postcard
*
Kir Jordan is currently completing his MFA thesis at Colorado State University where he is an Associate Editor of The Colorado Review. His poems have appeared in The Dead Mule, Colonnades, and the now defunct Unaffiliated Magazine.
L’image est sur le Mur
after John Ashbery
I
Imagination circulates in the seasons
adrift beneath the mind. A man
grabs the impact, the known solution.
This being so, the world responds.
A breath of his innocence swirls in the black domain.
We know why angels refuse such logical dreams,
the strange dismal wailing. The man’s mouth
resonates in the presence of plumes.
The picture retains the wall. But what
desolate shimmer betrays the moment? The ecstasy,
a blue shore, the man talking
about his destiny with only one hand?
II
A child sprinkles lemon seeds
into the green fountain. She leaves
and the seeds blossom. Now other children
awaken in startled petals.
The fountain supports them like a stem.
Angels caress the outline of a man
in the folds of the fountain.
Which disappears. Are there
catastrophes, conversations on the edge,
or did the vapors reappear when
the man walked away? Are the seeds protected
in the water’s worship, or did the shadows vanish?
Download the podcast (reading by Siona van Dijk)
Shirley J. Brewer is a poet, educator, and workshop facilitator in Baltimore. Shirley won first, second and third prizes in the Maryland Writers’ Association 2010 Short Works Contest for Poetry. Publication credits include Pearl, Comstock Review, Cortland Review, Little Patuxent Review, Passager, Manorborn, Free Lunch, and other journals. Her first poetry collection, A Little Breast Music, was published in 2008 by Passager Books.
Vermeeresque
by Jean Morris
Click image to view a larger version.
Jean Morris lives in London and blogs at tasting rhubarb and Trail Mix. She has a poetic essay and a photo in the current Issue 29 of BluePrintReview.
Bigfoot Kept Lumberjack as Love Slave
Wife Says Man “Not the Same” Since Return from Forest
by Lou Amyx
for John Wood, with apologies to Thomas Hardy
It’s true. For who could be
Called same that loved so free,
Keen, and wild as we upon that ridge in native wantonry?
Who would dare to claim
These dusky stars the same
As those which lustered bright at that convergence of our twain?
I was just a lumber-
Jack, off to fell a number
Of small saplings. Framed in shadows dappling, I remember . . .
Tho’ fearsome when we met, he
Soothed my dread and set me
High upon his mantlepiece — his prize; and he became my Yehti.
Joy was his task. Watch
My tender Sasquatch
Gently love my eyes and lips, neck and nips, belly, hips, ass, crotch.
Consummation comes;
My steaming vessel runs
Upon his iceburg; seas prolapse, and the black sky hums.
Fate has cracked the world
This titan valley, hurled
Us each to disparate peaks, then watched the lovesick plan unfurled.
Fate traced our course
Coincident — that coarse
First meeting. Glad melding. Grim cleaving. My enduring curse.
Dare not apprise of this
Beast the mere size of his
Shoes! Measure instead the insatiate sighs of His
Disconsolate Love
Who yearns here to prove —
I belong returned to him, and to that high mountain grove.
He read poetry to me
Beneath the oak tree
And the aspen. Now I miss him, and feel all things are parody.
Download the podcast (original music composed and performed by Joshua Amyx)
Poetry by Lou Amyx may be seen in The Arena, The Naugatuck River Review, Tidal Basin Review, at Melusine.com as the winner of the 2011 Vivienne Haigh-Wood Poetry Prize, and soon in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IV: Louisiana. A chapbook, The Bracelet, is available from Finishing Line Press. The recipient of creative writing MFA and English MA degrees, Lou teaches freshman writing classes at McNeese State University in Louisiana.
qarrtsiluni 