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

[Crisman Cooley]

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

If anyone is interested, 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 say which is which  
and which you like best and why.

But only if you ask for it.  Because I am not in the mood for speaking  
to a void.  [this may someday be the meaning of the verb "to  
blog"...  ;]


> From: jforjames at aol.com
> Subject: [New-Poetry] Anxiety of Influence
>
>
> Or confessions of an unintentional plagiarist…
>
> Â
>
> 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.
>
> 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 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.,