[New-Poetry] Anxiety of Influence

[jforjames at aol.com]

Or confessions of an unintentional plagiarist…

 

Don’t you hate when this happens: Last week I ran across this poem. Nothing in the first couple stanzas struck me, but coming upon the third I immediately thought of a poem I’d written a few years ago called “Jamestown” (about that early American settlement). Now I haven’t yet gone back to look carefully at my poem, but the sound of axes is, as I remember it, a very important image in my poem. Further, the concluding image of my poem had something do with “graves/dead bodies colonizing the earth” or something along those lines.

 

Possibilities…

1) I heard Louis Simpson read some years ago and he perhaps read this poem, and, though no images were remembered per se from that reading, somehow these images welled up in memory while I was writing the poem and thus arose unconsciously out of that first hearing.

2) Or I read this poem sometime before my poem was first drafted, with similar results as suggested in #1. 

3) A complete coincidence. Randomly images intersect all the time out there in the universe of poems.

4) Poems about The Colonies often say these kinds of things about axes and graves and such.

5) Many poetry geniuses share the same sources and imagery.

 
For now I'm going with #5.

Finnegan

--
To the Western World

 


A siren sang, and Europe turned away 
>From the high castle and the shepherd’s crook. 
Three caravels went sailing to Cathay 
On the strange ocean, and the captains shook 
Their banners out across the Mexique Bay. 


And in our early days we did the same. 
Remembering our fathers in their wreck 
We crossed the sea from Palos where they came 
And saw, enormous to the little deck, 
A shore in silence waiting for a name. 


The treasures of Cathay were never found. 
In this America, this wilderness 
Where the axe echoes with a lonely sound, 
The generations labor to possess 
And grave by grave we civilize the ground.


--Louis Simpson, “To the Western World” from The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940-2001. Copyright © 2003 by Louis Simpson. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.,
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