Prompted by the Summer edition of Rattle; an enthralling interview and its showcase of Non Fungible Tokens Poets, I've spent $25 on Tezos and tried a short poem as the basis for content text on AI artworks. Have you tried the controls, the market? I've hardly got started.
It's a right "Come all ye".
Finding similarities in first line imagery puts me in mind of borrowing, not stealing. Much as a poem written entirely in any particular poet's distinctive style has its own root cause, even if it that is tapped-in to what's come before, to be in that manner of delivery, of vocabulary, acknowledges what has come before.
In lyrics and in verse there is scope for an allowable, a reasonable sort of plagiarism, particularly when successful imagery stands on experience recreated and shared, whether that experience is in real or in fact only, in some manner recognised.
Then, first images/opening stanzas shape the last. In the example below we find Lowell in Mandelstam, today’s The Friday Poem’s verse by Ian Harker whether knowingly or not drawing on both. And the last lines loop, return to the start, as is common practice. It feels right musically, bar by bar, and as the concluding thought or verse echoes its own rationale by leading back to where it starts.
That comes off a bit pat. That is, as in any argument in speech we come full circle, addressing the starting point. Which does not mean opening lines show us so how far we can go but they suggest where we return to finish the verse. In this case, traffic in the snow.
That might suggest my preference for Mandelstam's poem over Lowell's - i'd hesitate to go so far as to say that. My simple inference and conclusion is Dylan’s line:
If there’s an original idea out there I could use it right now.
Three poem tops, then tails follow.
Petersburg
Lines
Above the yellow of the government buildings
the murky snowstorm has whirled for a long time
and the jurist settles down again in his sleigh,
with a broad gesture drawing his overcoat tighter.
The ships are hibernating, In the heat of the sun
the thick cabin glass has caught fire.
Leviathan, a battleship in dock,
Russia heavily rests.
For the Union
Dead
The old South Boston Aquarium
stands in a Saraha of snow now, Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Snowday
The cars are falling with long sighs
down Monk Bridge Road, their tanks empty
and the beck grinding to a halt
beneath the tarmac. This is how it ends:
cars slide to a stop in snow that wasn’t forecast
or if it was, it wasn’t supposed to stick,
vehicle skids into vehicle, voices on speaker
slur with the cold…
And conclusions:
The file of motor traffic flies into the mist;
odd-man-out Evgeny, touchy,
mild pedestrian, ashamed of his poverty
breathes in petrol fumes and curses fate.
&
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
&
...in the sliding, skittering cars
and there is beauty in the warning lights
but most of all there is beauty in how you fall.
From Osip Mandel'shtam, Selected Poems
translated by David McDuff, who wouldn't lose the poetry by emulating its original, stuffed-with rhyme form but tried for the sense and meaning of the work itself. And what touchstone fluid stuff it is. Wonderful. Poor Mandel'shtam: doomed to cross Stalin even trying to placate him.
Take for joy from the palms of my hands
fragments of honey and sunlight,
as the bees of Persephone commanded us.
Not to be untied the unmoored vessel,
not to be heard shadow walking on fur,
not to be mastered terror growing in thicketed life.
We have only kisses now,
furred like the smallest bees
found dead after their flight from the hive.
Bees rustling in translucency of densest night,
their home the sleepy forest of Taigetos,
their food time, lungwort, mint.
Take then, take for joy my wild gift,
a plain dry necklace of dead bees,
bees that changed honey into sunlight.
Feathers in our caps.
