[New-Poetry] Re: Anxiety of Influence / Confessions of an Un... Plagiarist

[Crisman Cooley]

JforJames, can you post your original 'unintentional plagiarism'?  I'd  
be interested to read it.

This Louis Simpson poem "To the Western World" is really quite  
beautiful and interesting to me.  I know it's old fashioned, but:   
"...grave by grave we civilize the ground" is an amazing line.   I  
have only read his translations of "modern" French poets.  Some I  
think are pretty good (Mallarme comes to mind).  Some, I think, can be  
improved upon.

If anyone is interested, respond to this msg and I'll post one of  
Simpson's translations, the original poem in French and my translation  
of the same.  It may be obvious, but I won't tell which is which and  
you guess which is which and which you like best and why.  That could  
be a bit of fun.


> From: jforjames at aol.com
> Subject: [New-Poetry] Anxiety of Influence
>
>
> Or confessions of an unintentional plagiarist╜
>
> Â
>
> Donâ•˙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 Iâ•˙d written a few  
> years ago called ╲Jamestown╡ (about that early  
> American settlement). Now I havenâ•˙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.
>
> Â
>
> 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.
>
> Â
> For now I'm going with #5.
>
> Finnegan
>
> --
> To the Western World
>
> Â
>
>
> A siren sang, and Europe turned away
>> From the high castle and the shepherdâ•˙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.,