Sunday, May 19, 2019

Who Wrote This Poem?

Have you ever stumbled upon a poem among your notes or files that you don't remember writing?  That you so don't remember writing that it's possible you didn't write it?  But for which there is no evidence--among your notes or files--that it was written by someone else?

Like most writers of poems, I am meticulous about dating poems and even drafts of poems that I write.   I use a simple system, a small notation of month and year, that tells me all I need to know.  Usually I start writing a poem long-hand, in notes and fragments or streams of thought in a notebook, which I then transfer to the screen of my laptop where it can be edited and stored.  As drafts approach what I think will be a finished version, I make a note of the month and year at the bottom.  Rarely, and I mean rarely do I neglect to do this.  

If I record somebody else's work in my notebook or in an electronic file, I always take care to document it, give enough attribution so I'll recognize the piece's provenance years on.

Just tonight I found this poem in a file on my laptop's hard drive:

Variations on a Question

. . . the dailiness of the sea . . .

. . . returns are my only itinerary . . .
                                            Neruda

Birds from fish, yellow
From roses, the sea from rivers.

Do you hear the yellow
Detonations of September?

If all rivers are sweet,
Where does the sea get its salt?

Are those fishes or birds or, perhaps
In the nets of the moon, roses?

What is rarer in this life
Than to be Pablo Neruda?

I found it in a file labeled "Cubist Poems" as part of a W@1 project titled "Ways of Looking: Poems That See the World Through Multiple Perspectives." (See this blog's entry for August 1, 2018.)  Was this my contribution to that project?  Or was it an example by some other writer that I meant to share with my colleagues at W@1?  Or was it a contribution by one of them?  The draft has no date.  I can't find a proto-version of it in my notebook for that period.

At first glance, it's not my style.  When I look at small pieces of evidence--syntax, sentence construction, image generation--it doesn't strike me at all as something I even could write.  Yet, the entry has no other attribution.

How odd!  Still, there is one detail that suggests the poem is mine: line endings and breaks.  The line endings here are grammatically balanced and regular; nouns in almost every instance.  I am partial to that.

But I don't remember writing it.  Which is really too bad because I like the poem very much.  It's quite Cubist in its multi-faceted perspective and apparent disjointedness.  I wish I could say with certainty that I wrote it.

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