When is an homage not a “steal“?
 

We here who live on poetry and gnaw computers or eat paper know that the really big bucks are readercoin, not cryptocash or even negotiable huge royalties, quite important as those are. In the music world, a performer who uses another’s signature melody when it is still in copyright must pay buckets of ducats to the copyright holder for the honor of “covering” something great. Out of copyright? Listen to “Kismet,” a superb musical whose songs are just about all lifted from the music of the Russian chemist Alexander Borodin. Not to be elitist, but Borodin is beluga caviar and “Kismet” is heavenly munchies. Both are wizard good.

What happens if writer A takes a brilliant signature image from writer B and slides it into something? Does that diminish B or rather create a bridge to be found by the great connoisseurs? Much depends on how good A is. If A is any good, it gives B a further life and deeper interest; if A is mediocre, it elevates B by comparison. B cannot lose.

For example, Shakespeare does not suffer by imitation, whether good or bad. He can only gain. Shakespeare remains terrific. Ditto Elizabeth Browning or Auden.

Imitation is an unforgiving test or a love feast of a sort.

Who would I or you want to gently imitate, even for five great words? My first choice would the equivalent of something extraordinary by say, Richard Wilbur, or the entire theme of a poem by John Updike about bottled sparkling water. Anyway, has anyone yielded to this temptation or has something so good in mind it makes you swoon? What would that be?

Leonard Cohen’s Alexandra leaving led me to Cavafy’s The God Abandons Antony and to Ithaka.

My teacher Willis Barnstone kept mentioning and exhibiting that Cavafy in translation. In order for an actual intertextual relationship to appear advantageously, both items should be easily available in a permanent form like a book. (If B writes an officially unpublished poem about shoelaces and A does something parallel yet mocking about shoehorns and runs with it, it’s very close to a steal—though, depending on B’s verve, it could be either an homage or nearly simultaneous creation, and only the Good Lord knows which.)

Once I sent what I thought was a nice little thing to a venue I will call The Freckled Vegetable. It was rejected, but promptly a variant by one of the Vegetable’s stable of tame poets appeared. I suppose it was meant as an homage...

Anyway, I’d use “To Bee or Not to Bee” any day of the week if it was apt.

Not sure if I'm leading this thread off-track but pragmatically as a 'go-to' guide, I find the Center for Media and Social Impact's 'Guide to best practice in poetry' an invaluable resource, although it's worth noting that the UK is far stricter in its copyright regulations (so be careful if you're publishing in the UK, US poets).

Intellectual property is interesting and complex, particularly with the introduction of creative commons licenses, although I don't think they're widely used in poetry the same way they are in open source software/images etc.

But it's a fluid landscape, attribution. And maybe underpinned by academic ethics (of referencing and the like) but then there are the arts-as-resistance ideologies that come into it too.

And then there is docupoetics, which is something different again (and which personally I'm really interested in but don't have enough time to properly read around at the moment.

I have to admit to a grave curiosity as to which publication 'The Freckled Vegetable' was. I will spend my evening thinking about bananas.

Anyway, I think the original question was 'does borrowing diminish', to which my answer would be that it's relative and dependent on both reader and writer and context. Are great paintings diminished when they're reproduced on a tote bag?

Sarah-Jane

S-J, it would be unkind to reveal what The Freckled Vegetable might be. No bananas. You have nineteen more guesses before you get the irrevocable Extraordinary Wiggling Hake badge affixed and go to gaol for 30 seconds.

Moving on…

Deleted Tuesday November 30

Hello Jack, You have posted “Rye” in the wrong forum. I suggest that you delete your post here using the Edit Post button at screen bottom on the right, and replace your post with brief explanatory apology, and it repost it in its entirety in Metrical or Nonmetrical and expect industrial strength critiques. This is not a critique forum. I will then alter this post you are reading accordingly. Best of luck.

Rescinded post.

There's a millennia-long tradition of poets riffing on other poets' poems. If the source poem isn't obvious, generally an acknowledgement like "After Lickspittle" or "After Lickspittle's 'Earwax Ode'" is expected.

With or without attribution, there is general frowning upon artists who fail to transform borrowed material into something uniquely new. It's sort of like on the cooking show Chopped, when a competitor gets scolded by the judges for just plopping some of the four required ingredients on the plate pretty much in the same form as when they were received, instead of doing something creative with each of the four.

Of course, when the rules of a competition are broken, there are judges to make sure cheaters don't prosper. In the poetry community, there's so little prospering anyway, and so many fewer people watching, that it's easier to get away with shortcuts, and those who feel wronged generally try to deputize a judge-jury-and-executioner social media posse. If that's where this thread is headed, I have other things to do.

I think Jack Land's point is whether this piece of prose about rye by another author, not intended as poetry, is either homage or theft when he breaks it into lineated verse. Allen I'm struggling to fully comprehend your anger over his posting.

Julie and W T,
I too hope this thread is not a crap thread. If I've gotten too touchy, I apologize.

Julie's analysis is very good. Let's imagine that I found a marvelous poem by someone else and want to call attention to it gently with a spotlight reference, yet am concerned that mentioning the other author might not work too well in my effort. How to reassure the other author that no malice is involved, nor is there any attempt to steal that person's thunder, but rather to praise it? My answer would be to carry the image a bit farther. I could even plead guilty to homage, but not stealing.

It's a tricky area perhaps. Maybe that's all I need to say.

I will accept that Jack’s post was an example of homage, however seemingly off track to me, and modify my recent posts. It takes all kinds to make a world.

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(I hope I'm reading this thread correctly.)
The line is indeed a fuzzy one. When artistic expression is involved (as opposed to a patent for example) it takes a fine-toothed comb to separate out the black from the white, the what from the who, what is homage from what is infringement, etc.

I believe Dylan has acknowledged he has lifted pieces of melodies and phrases from others without giving attribution. John Lennon was sued for lifting "Come Together" from the Chuck Berry song, "You Can't Catch Me". They settled out of court. Even Led Zeppelin's hallowed "Stairway to Heaven" has been contested as being lifted from somebody somewhere. Same as it ever was said somebody somewhere (David Byrne, actually). Heathcote Williams wrote a play AC/DC in which there is a soliloquy given on the subject of the slippery slope of plagiarism.

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Thanks Jim,
Maybe a useful parallel might be the momentary visual echo by others in their films of what is truly an iconic visual image from Ingmar Bergman’s film “The Seventh Seal” where at the end a personified death figure leads a train of individuals along the horizon on a hill. I’ve seen homages to that at least two or three times. The original is stark, unforgettable.

Again, being the voice of pragmatism, if they're alive, ask them? And if they aren't available to ask, ask their agent or publisher. And if they're dead, ask their estate. Agents, publishers are (generally) humans, too. My advice based on lived experience would be to make sure you are very direct and straightforward in your request, rather than overtly flowerly or opaque in your language - be specific about how and why you're using the author in question.

Sarah-Jane

S-J,
Very good.

Just for fun, can you or anyone else imagine a situation where on this type of topic something that works in practice doesn’t work in theory?

Artists are sometimes super competitive. The actual dialectic of what you suggest, reasonably in fact, assumes a lot about, well, artists, who are, as we know, if they are any good, exquisitely intense people. I’m sorry because I don’t have good modern examples and have to go classical here: when the Roman poet Ovid “flirted” with the older Roman poet Horace, it would have been indelicate and disastrous to have named names. Frenemy
is a term that would have applied there I think.

Yet all that isn’t quite what this thread is about, which is, how best to use good stuff that deserves thoughtful although quiet lauding. Not parody, praise.

Allen,

Your last statement defines a pastiche verse, such as this turkey for the holiday:

After Robert Burns: A Red, Red Rose


A Red, Red Snood

My turkey has a red, red snood
And when he runs it wobbles.
My turkey’s snood detects what food
Causes garbled gobbles.

So soft and plump are you my fowl,
So heavy you can’t fly,
But plucked, without your cowl,
You’ll brown as you deep-fry.

And when you’re bronzed by the deep-fry,
You’ll be our honored guest,
And all the kids will sing and sigh
And praise you as the best!

I’ll bet that after all this trouble,
In heaven for fowl foods,
You’ll grin and gobble as we gobble
All but red, red snoods.

Well, my love is like a rose that newly glows in June, April, May, and all months with or without the letter R. You didn’t spare the horses to speed your poem in time for Thanksgiving. It’s timely and cute, careening close to gentle parody. I’m struggling to find a workable example of what I mean among living Eratosphere people without scraping the curb. Maybe Ann Drysdale, who writes so well, has done something one of us could echo with an air kiss. A houseboat image in another person’s poem; I wouldn’t dare try that yet because I’m unwilling to act like I’m up to her level. That’s the idea though.

Personally, I don't think structuring this poem in a way that is so patently derivative from this poem does the impact any favors whatsoever. Others may disagree, and may feel that the nod to another poem makes the shocking content of the newer poem more tolerable. I think it would have been more effective being taken on its own terms, though.

Wow, Julie, wow. A painful first poem.

I published a poem entitled "Middle Age" a few years back that was a reaction to a poem by Robert Lowell. I had an epigraph to acknowledge that and the editor of the journal insisted I remove it. He wouldn't publish the poem if I didn't so I removed it, but I still think it wasn't the right thing to do and do not understand why he was so insistent I not acknowledge the influence of another poem and poet.

John, I've never understood the prevailing desire to cater to the elitist assholery of certain readers (real or imagined) who take offense when given info that an English Literature Ph.D. wouldn't need, but that normal people might find useful.

A curious business model, isn't it? Make as many people as possible feel excluded and intimidated by the art form we're supposedly trying to promote? And how has turning poetry into such an inside joke been working out, sales-wise, over the past century or so?

Oh, we're not going to get into "modernism has made poetry impossible for the average reader to understand, make poetry accessible again!!!!!" arguments are we? I thought such silly ideas had been put to bed years ago. If the work of understanding a poem take longer than five minutes, then at least that poem is intellectually engaging. Art has a right to be difficult, if it is truly mimetic of human experience.
Hopefully, Julie, we're not heading toward that argument, are we?

Also, judging poetry's popularity on sales figures is a very capitalist way of commodifying quality, isn't it?


Though, I will admit, I utterly agreee with you when it comes to giving information.

Actually, for me the savage impact of the “sisters” poem would be lessened if the Harjo model were mentioned. Both are long non-metrical list poems with very similar line starts. I don’t know what Harjo might think. She cut a path, another used it powerfully. Which one is “better”, I dare not attempt. There is an example in a poem by Oscar Wilde about early modern Huguenot Christian martyrs in France that closely parallels and echoes another written contemporaneously by an early modern English poet writing about something similar. I don’t have either handy this instant. Though valuable in my mind, Wilde’s seems like a kind of laudable virtue signaling; the earlier one seems much more genuine, if only because it was timely.

I'd agree - the similarity is in the structure and the visceral/imagistic quality of the language, but it didn't read like any type of homage to me, or at least any more than sonnets about love are homages to sonnets about love.

Maybe it's context - some types of structure have been so embedded in a sense of what 'poetry' is that using them ceases to be a homage and is simply a way of placing an idea in a format. Others have not, but are waiting in the wings to becoming forms/types/armatures to write within (having said that, a list poem is fairly established form, I'd have thought).

In terms of words/text working without references, I think perhaps the best poems - the really fantastically transformative ones, from my perspective, are the ones that work as a multiplicity of simultaneous storytellings - so if they're allusive and the reader 'gets' the allusion then that's great, but they also work to communicate an idea without needing to know the allusion - the allusion is just one tiny ingredient amongst many in the poem.

And readers tend to like to prove their worth as readers, too - power and agency and all that. And critics tend to like to prove their worth as critics, so if they're feeling insecure will divert to high-sounding opacities of language. And ultimately maybe reading is just about a dialogue between reader, text, and context, and the meanings shift/change depending on a multiplicity of things that will, of course, refer to other previous things because that's part of the context of both reading and making.

Too many words. Sorry.

Sarah-Jane

Ah, “high-sounding opacities of language.” Oh boy, does that speak to me. “Intertextuality,” “the male gaze,” for example in the classics. “Regression in the service of the Ego” in Freudian analytics. “Correction” in discussion of stock market nose dives. Blather. They all mean something, even something real, but as a possessor of The Male Gaze, I can’t avoid it, and, within some serious limits, would never want to, ever. I am very visual, auditory also. I would never lower my estimate of un”beautiful” people; they are only what they are, and bless them for being alive. So, since this is a non-vanishing thread, I’m on record here as a sinner, if that be a Sin (rather than an estimate, however faulty, of the bio health of my neighbors). We, you included, could do a valuable thread on academic bullshit.

Artistic difficulty is fine if it's earned, Cameron. If I have to put in the time and effort to grapple with a difficult poem or painting or musical composition, the payoff in terms of enjoyment or other impact had better be worth it.

But I was mainly discussing poets and editors with the attitude, "If you can't catch a Robert Lowell reference without help, you're not worthy to read this." I'm glad we are in agreement in terms of the utility of notes, or at least of references that people can plug into a search engine, if they feel inclined to look something up.

A reading of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Ever since I first read Frost’s famous poem I have smelled something about it that to me suggests that he was thinking about some other living poet (possibly e.e. cummings) who lived in Greenwich Village. Much the same applies to Frost’s “A Considerable Speck.” Anyway, right or wrong here’s my butchered reading:

Whose *words* these are I think I know.
His house is in the *village* though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his *words* fill up with snow [frost].

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the *words* and frozen [frosty] lake [look or like]
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness [hearing reference] bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy [why “easy”?] wind [flatulence (!?)] and downy [negative opinion?] flake.

The *words* are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Deleted December 30

Well, I
think that if I
were you I
wouldn't bother.

Gesundheight, Jack. Thanks, Ann.

Voyage
 

Deleted February 20

Thank you so much for deleting your next most recent post. I presume you will delete the one just above when you tire of it. Good. There’s no connection between it and the rest of the thread. Bah!

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Allen: "Ever since I first read Frost’s famous poem I have smelled something about it that to me suggests that he was thinking about some other living poet (possibly e.e. cummings) who lived in Greenwich Village."


Frost had no quarrel with or envy of cummings that I can find. Famously, the only one Frost had quarreled with was the world. I think you're wildly stretching it to join the two. Unless, of course, you're just having fun.

Other than the sonic similarities of "woods" and "words" and the mention of "village", your poetic hypothesis falls face first in the snow. Your attempt to tie the two titans of modern American poetry falls flat after the first stanza's "village" reference. I don't think Frost had it in him. And besides, he was a naturalist at heart and lived many years in snowy Vermont (where he wrote the poem) and New Hampshire. He wrote the poem because he lived the poem.

Oddly, cummings died in the land of Frost (New Hampshire) and Frost died in the land of cummings (Cambridge, MA). They died within four months of each other. They were both poets. Other than that, the two were Macintosh and Macoun. Sweet and tart. Respectively.


Maybe your final stanza could read:

The *words* are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have punctuation to keep,
And commas to go before I sleep,
And commas to go before I sleep.

.

This is an idealized picture of Frost, who was a great poet but apparently a real shit. He seems to have borrowed money from people who were less well off than he was and never paid them back. At at least one poet's reading, his nasty comments had to be shushed.

Actually he had quite a famous quarrel with Stevens.

Jim, I rather like your stanza. Otherwise, I am willing to agree to disagree. Frost very frequently leaves me cold, and no pun is intended. If I’m FM radio, Robert Frost is AM. I’m totally aware that just gobs and gobs of people shiver with pleasure at the mention of his name and praise his prosody. Not I, said the third little pig—but, my my, what big eyes you have heartless Frosty, and not by the hair on my chinny-chinny-chin-chin (frequently shaven) will I love you ever so much as JFK did.

Thanks, Max and Cameron.

Accidental duplicate post.

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Max, Allen, I'm more familiar with Frost the poet than I am the man. I didn't mean to infer he got along with everyone; I was more referring to his Frost's tombstone epitaph.

Frost's bungled appearance at the JFK inauguration was a tough break (though it was viewed sympathetically at the time). The sun was blinding. He did have a swagger to him that was Twain-like at times — minus the great satirical wit of Twain. He was much beloved by those who loved him : )


Max: "This is an idealized picture of Frost, who was a great poet but apparently a real shit. He seems to have borrowed money from people who were less well off than he was and never paid them back. At at least one poet's reading, his nasty comments had to be shushed."

I didn't know about those things. Much of my impression of him as a man/poet was gleaned from this interview. I do like his poetry very much. Of course he could have signed a book for those he owed at the time and that would have paid back the debt. I heard Picasso (?) would sometimes dash off a sketch on a napkin in payment for a meal in a restaurant.

..

Jim et al., absolutely the last thing I want to is to turn this thread into a Robert Frost demolition derby, nor do I want to throw ugly paint on Robert Frost’s reputation as a great poet. I’ve just never felt a kinship with him. I’ve already said more than enough about that. However, here are two links which are certainly not very well edited, being repetitious and otherwise wordy. I do think that they both repay a complete reading however. Maybe after that, we can all let Robert Frost and my failure to thrill at most of his efforts rest a bit. When I was really introduced to his poetry in college, I thought, Wow, here’s a famous writer I don’t “get” — or truly don’t want to “get”. There are a few other poets that aren’t high on my list, that better people than I rate highly. Enough. Here are the links:

https://wydaily.com/story/2017/03/26...rofessor-says/

https://medium.com/invisible-illness...n-54a5b73f66b5