Appropriation (3.1.20)

Curt had an idea for a project that will be fun to take on . . . not for this coming Wednesday, but for the following week (March 11), to give you time to think and feel it through. That is, to write a poem of your own from a favorite first line of someone else’s poem.

This will be an interesting exercise in appropriation.

But before we get into the project, a few words about what I hope this project is not: misappropriation. Appropriation has often been a sensitive topic among writers and artists. I read a piece recently taking certain famous art movements (Cubism, Fauvism) to task for appropriating indigenous art and culture for their own artistic purposes. (Not to be confused with the formal concept of appropriation, especially in painting, where the artist incorporates objects into a composition "as is," as in Duchamps' famous "ready-mades.")

The sensitive form of appropriation I'm talking about here is really expropriation--lifting a cultural element out of context without understanding or "earning" it. Last year, a young poet was accused of appropriating (expropriating) not just black culture, but a man's homelessness, by adopting a "black voice" and "black" locutions in a poem. He is, of course, a young, white Midwesterner. He was admonished by some in the press to "stay in his own lane." He was later defended by an African American scholar who argued that the locutions the poet used were all accurate and current; technically, the poem was spot on, even if written by a Midwestern white dude.

The appropriation this project wants is of a different, and less freighted kind, I hope.

Have you ever read a poem and thought, “If I had written that line, I’d have taken it in a different direction”? Or maybe you simply admired the line for what it is, a memorable piece of sense and syntax! 

Well, now is your chance to play with that memorable line. So try this: 

• Re-read a poem that you admire. Note how it begins, builds, then arrives at its final line, how it is constructed (sense and syntax), the music it makes from line to line, its word choices, its cadence, point of view, and so on, as well as the theme it develops.
• Using this poem’s first line as your own, write a new poem. You can try to mimic the original in terms of form and meter and/or theme, or you can depart from the original and let the borrowed line take your poem where it wants to go.
• At our Wednesday, March 11 session, bring both poems, the original and the new. No need to make extra copies of the original, but do bring one copy that can be passed around the table.

The temptation, I imagine, will be for humor or some other easy sentiment, or maybe for a clever rhyme scheme or turn of phrase. But don’t just go there automatically. Think about this project: given the first line of the poem you select to work with, where would you take a poem from there? Is there something in that line—a modulation of voice, a style of image, a syntax, a level of diction, a potential theme—that suggests to you where to go?

Your poem need not become a comment on the original, though that’s certainly an option. It can simply be a new destination from the same beginning.

Have fun!  Write better!

-C