Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
—Charles Caleb
Colton (British author, 1780-1832)
When I was earning
a MFA in Poetry Writing at The New School in Manhattan, I had the privilege of
studying with the poet and writer David Lehman. David had a certain way of
teaching, bringing in poems and encouraging us to try the same things, and we
started to sort of catch on. During one workshop class another student finally
asked, “Is it ok to imitate
somebody?”
To which David
replied, “I think imitation is a fine way to learn how to write.” And he said
it with his very dry tone of voice that meant he thought it was maybe the only
way to learn how to write.
And when I thought
about it, I realized that that’s what I had been doing my whole creative
career, even back before I began writing, when I was playing music: I would
find a bass player I liked, like Steve Harris from Iron Maiden, and learn all
his songs so that my ‘style’ of playing began to be like Steve Harris, with
superfast galloping right hand rhythms. But at the same time, I would be
learning all of Geddy Lee from Rush’s bass lines, more melodic, sometimes
actual bass melodies under ringing guitar chords and his style would also be
incorporated into mine. The two styles (plus others—Jaco Pastorius, Billy
Sheehan) would weave together into something new, something unique to me,
something mine.
The same thing
happened with the bands I was in. If we all liked the guitarist Yngwie
Malmsteen, then our original songs sounded like Yngwie Malmsteen (lots of harmonic
minor melodies). That was ok, because Yngwie Malmsteen got a lot of his exotic
middle-eastern ‘chops’ from Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple. He even dressed
and posed like Ritchie Blackmore! But he was also influenced by Jimi Hendrix,
so had some weird psychedelic bluesy stuff thrown in there. Plus the speed of
Paganinni’s violin works. But if we also liked Metallica, then we’d incorporate
crunchy guitar rhythms, and growling vocals. Or Queensrÿche, with high , clear,
singing and harmonies. That’s how garage bands work, really, by doing ‘cover’
songs of favorite bands, and filtering in aspects from all our favorite groups
into our own original work. One of my favorite Metallica albums is Garage Inc., because it’s a two disk
(back when there were discs) compilation of all the covers songs they ever
recorded, giving fans an at least partial look at where they came from, from
British kings of heavy metal Black Sabbath to obscure Los Angels hardcore band
The Misfits, to the weird Danish singer King Diamond, but also alt-rock
Australian singer Nick Cave, and even 70s pop icons Blue Oyster Cult and Queen.
Likewise, every
writer has a long ‘family tree’ of influences. We’re all children of our
literary parents, and grandparents, and great-grandparents! I could list dozens
of influences, starting in fiction, from Kerouac, Hemingway, Marguerite Duras,
J.D. Salinger, to Melville, Shakespeare, Cervantes. And the poets: Snyder,
Ginsberg, Bukowski, O’Hara, back to Milton and Dante. Not to mention
philosophers like Sartre, Nietzsche, Mencius, Chuang-tze, and Plato. Plus, who
knows, maybe my favorite songwriters as well, like Lennon, Leonard, Dylan,
Townes Van Zant. Or course everyone shares some influences and has their own.
Some people can’t stand Bukowski, others love Virginia Woolf. That’s what makes
us all unique voices. The most unoriginal writers are those who aren’t well
read. If all you’ve read is the Harry Potter books, then all you’re going to
write is a cheap imitation of JK Rowling.
By the time I was
concentrating on writing in college I was starting with short, small poems, but
when I took a contemporary poetry class from Diane Wakoski at Michigan State,
she played us, among other things, a recording of Anne Waldman reciting her
famous long poem “Fast Speaking Woman” (short excerpt below)
I’m the discerning woman
I’m the dissonant woman
I’m the anarchist woman
I’m the Bantu woman
I’m the Buddha woman
I’m the baritone woman
I’m the bedouin woman
(18)
Shortly after, I
wrote a poem called “Slacker” (which was a buzzword at the time inspired in
part by the Richard Linklater movie of that name) and though unfortunately I
don’t have it any more (or maybe the Gentle Reader would say fortunately) I basically took Waldman’s
premise of repeating a word at the end of different phrases and the energy that
kind of repetition can (and in her case does) evoke. For example, “I’m a long
haired slacker/I’m a guitar playing slacker.” etc. I’m not even doing myself
justice for back then, but at the time it was a real jump in my writing, to
longer lines and poems in general, as well as getting me into the use of
‘chanting’ and repetition as a way to build power, a technique I still use.
And, Diane loved it and said I should send it out to literary magazines (I
didn’t—at the time I was too intimidated by that process).
Another example of
imitating somebody is when David Trinidad, another New School instructor, had
us read some poems by Tim Dlugos. I really liked one called “Brian and Tim”
which is basically two columns with a name at the top of each, comparing
himself and his friend:
New York Massachusetts
D.C. New
York
the mountains the ocean
St. Bonny’s LaSalle
graduate degree college
dropout
ceramics poetry
Paris Dakar
Denver L.A.
Chinese French
ex-Catholic bad
Catholic
waiter copywriter
Reheboth Beach Fire Island
Pines
bridge TV
Montaigne Frank
O’Hara
Rascals The
Ninth Circle
sleeping with
someone sleeping
alone
going home with
someone on going home with
someone on
the second date the first
meeting
introducing self
before having sex
before introducing
having sex self
young men boys
The Dry Look The Wet
Look
Moet Heineken
a townhouse a
highrise
red blue
twenty-eight thirty-one
twenty-six twenty
ratatouille paella
an altar boy a
priest
A Confederacy Our Mutual Friend
conservative
Republican Sixties
liberal
Jockey briefs boxer
shorts
overwork indolence
psilocybin mescaline
cocaine cocaine
Lacoste Lacoste
Proust Proust
(27)
I loved, and still
love, how much these two simple lists reveal about Dlugos and his
friend/lover/partner, and how the juxtaposition shows reveals the differences
and similarities in their personalities, and their relationship. I can imagine
what the two of them were like, individually, and together. I liked this idea
so much I tried it myself, only with a heterosexual version, between me and an
old girlfriend:
Nan & Yohe
Squad 1 Squad
2
Rochester, MN Jackson,
MI
25 27
chingadera pulaski
German Spanish
“one of the guys” loner
beer orange
juice
vegetarian for health vegetarian
for moral reasons
travel travel
backpacking backpacking
portable stove meals peanuts
& raisins
A Good Man is Hard
To Find Trainspotting
Nick Cave Tool
Samantha from Bewitched Samantha from Bewitched
hot, dirty sex hot,
dirty sex
Penthouse Leg Show
receiving massages giving
massages
w/another man while I watched w/her and another woman
5 pull-ups 10
pull-ups
5 miles 3
miles
‘69 BMW convertible ‘87
Toyota pick-up
jeans & black t-shirt jeans
& black t-shirt
Tevas Converse
High-Tops
men’s boxer briefs (black) men’s
boxer briefs (black)
This is not to say
it’s a great poem or not, but to demonstrate how I wrote my own ‘take’ on
Dlugos’ idea. Trying ideas out in different form. Or trying out a form with
different ideas.
David Lehman also
had an interesting ‘reverse imitation’ exercise, which he called “destroying a
poem.’ The idea being to take a poem that you hate (and believe me after
getting an MFA degree there will be plenty poems you hate) and making it your
own. For example, take all the nouns and put in their opposites. Or take the
style of a poet, say simple sentences ending with periods, and write sentences
dripping with sarcasm, mocking the subject matter, and end them with periods. A
quick, if not profound, example being when one classmate took William Carlos
William’s poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which he hated, and changed the first
two words from “So much” to “Jack shit”, so it came out, “Jack shit depends /
on a red wheelbarrow / glazed with rain water / beside the white chickens.”
I myself didn’t
care for the poetry of Susan Wheeler (also a teacher at the New School), nor
the young L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poet groupies that followed her around and thought
any other kind of poetry was shit (though that wasn’t her fault)(and yes I have
issues...) so I ‘destroyed’ a poem of hers, “What Memory Reveals.” First the
original:
What Memory Reveals
Angels, pulled into light—provoking
the air, fall
here. You are served a fallow
breakfast;
you must stir your juice. Outside,
on Columbus Avenue,
a momentary lunge convenes a
trafficked burst.
This is not what was intended when
they took you to your first
photo session, swaddled. But intent
is a ruinous composite.
There were several years of careful
steps across
lower Manhattan. A looming sail in
a nightmare,
a pool hall, crisscrossed by
rudimentary reliefs.
Mayonnaise in a refrigerator door.
You stepped forward, into light,
onto a green lawn dotted with tumblers
and the hum of Minnesota cicadas.
Everywhere a firm rejoinder waved.
He whispered the simplest, pettiest
of comforts. Your dress alit.
A fat man bends beneath the
beaker’s proximity.
Freakish, the two that burst into
your room where you
were gathering privacy frantically,
phonetically.
Burnish
(they are flying) regulation
(appointments a
calamity of rosewood)—or perhaps
they said
furnish
the nation. This left a hole, that left a lacking,
and he, the dog, had it, too. (3)
Since we had just
read the short story by Hemingway, “A Clean Well Lighted Place,” I stole the
idea of the waiter spouting off using the word nada in every sentence to show
his disdain for society, and replaced every noun, or noun phrase, in Wheeler’s
poem with the word ‘nothing.’ There was the initial satisfaction of having done
that, but then a weird thing happened: As I revised the poem, taking out some
phrases, shortening it up, tightening some lines, it ended up being a poem I
liked, which was published in FENCE:
What Nothing Reveals
(for
Susan Wheeler)
Freakish, nothing burst into
nothing where you
were gathering nothing frantically,
phonetically.
Nothing is flying, Nothing a
calamity
of nothing–or perhaps they said
nothing.
This left nothing, that left nothing
and he,
nothing, had it, too.
Now
nothing rearranges nothing.
On the
right there is nothing, nothing
or
nothing, in a bright and terrifying nothing.
Nothing
altered nothing. Pressed to the rear of
nothing
toward nothing, you started with nothing
with
nothing that troubles you still. Like nothing
who only
dreamed, you can’t shake nothing.
Nothing,
straightened now, is white against nothing.
Nothing
confirms. Nothing replies.
There is
nothing like nothing.
Nothing
drops out.
You pay
for nothing.
There is
nothing to fill nothing,
nothing
yawing in nothing
on
nothing.
There’s no real
difference between ‘be influenced by’ and ‘imitate’ except maybe how far in the
past the verb refers to. Influence may have the feeling of taking a part, or
trace, of someone’s work. Imitation sounds negative, derivative, like the
phrase ‘a cheap imitation.’ I guess the fear people might have in admitting
they are ‘imitating’ (versus telling themselves they're coming up with
completely brand new ideas) is ending up like the Salieri character in the
movie Amadeus: That in comparison with a genius like Mozart you would feel like
a second-rate hack. But even though that movie is one of my favorites, there
are things left untalked about, like that Mozart had to play hours and hours
when he was young, hours and hours of music by other composers. Mozart did not
come from a vacuum. Still, a better word might be ‘emulation,’ which, I feel,
carries with it the idea of caring
about the other thing/work/artist. There’s certainly no such thing as a cheap
emulation!
I don't think we
even always consciously imitate. In
‘real’ life, at work for example, if you like Manager A, but can’t stand
manager B, when you get a chance of managing yourself, you end up imitating the
things that Manager A did. But then you also bring in other ‘influences’, say
your soccer coach in high school. There is even a negative form of imitation—if
you don’t like Manager B, you avoid doing the things Manager B does. You may do
the opposite, or something different. Anything but imitate what Manager B does.
Again, maybe not consciously, but you don’t learn how to be a good manager out
of the blue. Thinking about another person and how they would handle
situations, in pop culture becomes the bumper sticker What Would Jesus/Buddha Do? But why not? In this case, you might
call what we are doing ‘learning by example’ but that sounds a lot like
imitation, though ‘imitation’ might not outright carry the idea of ‘learning’
attached to it, but it’s there: you can’t imitate anything very well without
understanding how it works.
Another example of
emulation in my own writing is when I
read this Kim Addonizios’s poem “The Matter” in APR, which later appeared in her book, _____:
The Matter
Some
men break your heart in two...
--Dorothy Parker, "Experience"
Some men
carry you to bed with your boots on.
Some men
say your name like a verbal tic.
Some men
slap on an emotional surcharge for every erotic encounter.
Some men
are slightly mentally ill, and thinking of joining a gym.
Some men have moved on and can't be seduced, even in the
dream bars you meet them in.
Some men
who were younger are now the age you were then.
Some men
aren't content with mere breakage, they've got to burn you to the ground.
Some men
you've reduced to ashes are finally dusting themselves off.
Some men
are made of fiberglass.
Some men
have deep holes drilled in by a war, you can't fill them.
Some men
are delicate and torn.
Some men
will steal your bracelet if you let them spend the night.
Some men
will want to fuck your poems, and instead they will find you.
Some men
will say, "I'd like to see how you look when you come," and then hail
a cab.
Some men
are a list of ingredients with no recipe.
Some men
never see you.
Some men
will blindfold you during sex, then secretly put on high heels.
Some men
will try on your black fishnet stockings in a hotel in Rome, or Saran Wrap you
to a bedpost in New Orleans.
Some of
these men will be worth trying to keep.
Some men
will write smugly condescending reviews of your work, making you remember those
lines by Frank O'Hara:
I cannot
possibly think of you/other than you are: the assassin/ of my orchards.
Some men,
let's face it, really are too small.
Some men
are too large, but it's not usually a deal breaker.
Some men
don't have one at all.
Some men
will slap you in a way you'll like.
Some men
will want to crawl inside you to die.
Some men
never clean up the matter.
Some men
hand you their hearts like leaflets,
and some
men's hearts seem to circle forever: you catch sight of them on clear nights,
bright dots among the stars, and wait for their orbits to
decay, for them to fall to earth.
I loved it, loved
its energy and humor and sexiness. Addonizio too seems influenced by, and
emulating, Ann Waldman, with the use of repetition as both an anchor and a way
to build energy, but with maybe a little Bukowski grunginess. Not to mention
that she’s taking an idea from (or ‘riffing’ on) Dorothy Parker. I was
inspired, immediately wanting to try something similar—it seemed obvious that a
reply was needed, a response, almost as a dialogue/discussion with Addonizio.
That, if there were a poem with (true) generalizations about men, then a man
should reply back with, “Oh yeah? Well, some
women....” So the next night, after letting the idea burble in my brain a
bit, I wrote the first draft of what became “You might,” which was eventually
published in RATTLE:
You might
Some women let
you feed them chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream spoonful by spoonful
Some women let
you brush their hair before going to bed
Some women seem
so terrified of contact you feel sad
Some women
wonder why you are so scared of
contact
Some women like
to be alone, but not a lot
Some women have
good relationships with their mothers though I don’t know if they’re in the
majority
Some women
dress sexy then get mad when you want to fuck them
Some women just
laugh at you
Some women
write poems you want to fuck
Some women will
tell you stories while you masturbate even though they would rather you fuck them
Some women will
fuck you
Some women seem
to decide whether they want to marry you or not in the first month
Some women get
confused when you don’t want to
Some women
don’t want children but will rarely admit it in public
Some women have
children alone because fuck it
Some women
don’t watch tv, but not a lot
Some women go
to movies alone, though not a lot
I don’t know
any woman who will go backpacking alone
Some women play
guitar or saxophone and you want to be with them just for that, even if they have
a history of insanity in their family
Some women eat
spaghetti with chopsticks
Some women
smoke pot daily
Some women talk
about writing screenplays
Some women
actually do
Some women
marry rich men because they think the men will be good providers
Some women even
tell themselves that they love these men
And when they
eventually divorce they marry other rich men for the same reason
And though some
women might marry men who earn less money, this causes problems
Some women
wanted to be vampires when they were girls
Some wanted to
be mermaids
Some wanted to
be catwomen with purple fur and tails
Some women act
more like girls than some girls, and versa vice, and both are more attractive
because of that though you’re not sure you want to be with either
Many women will
take any excuse to skinny-dip
Some women like
sex though many need some catching up to do
Some women have
more porn on their computers than you
Some women take
their clothes off for money, though these women are not recommended
Some women are
more attractive when they have a boyfriend or husband
Some women bake
pumpkin pies and carry them on the plane as a present when they visit you in
New York
Some women
sound relieved when you call and say you just can’t move to Seattle to be with
them
Some women keep
trying to interest you even after you have moved out, which hurts more than the
moving out
Some women have
been fucked (up) by their fathers and will never be right and it’s not your
fault though it maybe seems like it and feeling sorry for them is not a reason
to stay
Some women are
fine with being with you for the month you spend in Salamanca and won’t even
necessarily cry when you say goodbye in Madrid, though you might
Some women like
men
Some are scared
of men
Some seem to
feel both at the same time, which makes you feel weird
Some women will
wait for you to decide to get your life together, though not a lot, and not
forever anymore, if that was ever true
Some women are
right there, visible, with bruises
just like yours
I used the phrase
‘some men’ as the anchor for the chant/rant, just like Addonizio. I also used
her idea of the title being a phrase from the poem itself. I included sexy
things and quirky things, and quirky sexy things, about women I’d known
(Biblically or not). I also wanted to my poem to end, not abruptly, but
gradually, with some gentle pauses, like Addonizio’s. I like that the whole
poem stands on its own, but that knowing about Addonizio’s adds to the playful
‘gender war’ effect.
I base my teaching
and all my writing classes on this idea of imitation/emulation. I’ve used both
of these poems into my own classrooms, creative writing and composition, and
even developmental writing, to show them my own writing process, to show them
this is how writing works. I always have them try writing their own ‘some
men/some women’ poems as well, and they love it, I think because Addonizio
gives them ‘permission’ to get funny and weird and talk about sex and gender
(though there are variations, like ‘some people’ and ‘some teachers,’ for example).
Whatever word we
actually use, imitation/emulation, we actually already use the concept in our
writing classes, from creative writing to ‘composition.’ When we have our
students read sample essays, we are not only giving them ideas for what to write about, but how to write them, from basics like how
to write dialogue, to if/when to use humor or not. In fact, I’ve always thought
reading is at least as important as
writing itself in improving writing. This is harder to get composition students
to do, unfortunately, and especially with my developmental writing students,
because many don’t really read that much (no coincidence that people who don’t
read enter college behind in all their subjects). I can get my students to
write in class, they accept they they’ll have to do that, but to do the same
with reading, to have them come to class and make them sit there for a half
hour and read something, just doesn’t work as well. The best I can hope for is
short spurts, poems or sections of essays. I can’t ever guarantee that they’ll
consciously try other people’s ideas, but I do guarantee that those ideas go
into their brains, with either positive or negative opinion of it, and that it
will come out at some point. Writing teachers talk about developing our ‘voice’
in writing—this is how we do it. Whether imitation or emulation, both come from
inspiration, from liking something so
much you ‘take it in,’ you breathe it in. And, like breathing, it’s just
something we do naturally, and something that gives us life, helps us grow, and
get better. We breathe out, and that’s where our voice comes from—from what we
have breathed in. Our voice a combination of the voices that have come before
us.
Works Cited
Addonizio,
Kim. ______
Dlugos,
Tim. powerless. London and New York: Serpent’s Tail High Risk Books,
1996.
Waldman,
Anne. Fast Speaking Woman. San Francisco: City Lights, 1975.
Wheeler,
Susan. Bag ‘o’ Diamonds. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press,
1993.
Yohe,
John. “You might” RATTLE #29. Los
Angeles, CA. Summer 2008.
Yohe,
John. “Nan & Yohe.” Unpublished.
Yohe,
John. “What Nothing Reveals.” THE HAT #7.
2007. Also appeared in: What Nothing
Reveals. Ann Street Press 2010: Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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