Did you know that Wallace Stevens lives on here at The Slam?  That the White Lady of Amherst peeks through her curtains to check in on the site once in awhile, and that Lewis Carroll dreams up new nonsense rhymes just for us?  This month, even Wang An-Shih, the eleventh-century Chinese poet and statesman, has made an exciting appearance.  How do we entice such literary luminaries to join us here on The Slam? The answer is simple: Great writers inspire more great writing, and through talented poets like you, dear Slammers, the echoes of these authors' works live on.

If you follow the works on The Slam, you’ve read some of the great slammables inspired by famous poets: "Our Teeth (after Wallace Stevens)" by Sterl of Virginia, "Emily Dickinson in the Morning" by Jane_MR of New Jersey, "Slaying the Jabberwocky" by Penguino of New York.  Each of these pieces deftly avoids either borrowing too little -- losing the entire flavor of the original work -- or borrowing too much -- repeating too closely what's already been done.  This month, Melita brings us yet another apt imitative poem: "First Winter Here (After 'Gazing North' by Wang An-Shih)."  This piece of verse is so brief -- a mere four lines -- yet so lovely that it offers the perfect opportunity to take a closer look at what makes good derivative poetry.

Melita's piece is inspired by Wang An-Shih’s original poem, translated to "Gazing North."  In this spare piece, Wang An-Shih describes a white-haired old man, aching to see the northlands of his youth once again, but prevented from making the journey by his age, harsh weather, and immense distance.  The narrator expresses pity for the beautiful new moon, trapped, like him, in a cold world where no one can appreciate its beauty.  Melita brings us a poem with a similar setting, using much of the same sentence structure as Wang An-Shih's original piece -- but she finds a way to shape the poem to her own purposes:

Eyes purple-shadowed, I dream to see my far-off mountains
but I cannot walk from here: ice-worn hills, sleet falling.

Pity these poems -- all those black spider words, and why read them?
It's freezing. Bare branches reach to scar the clouds.

How does Melita honor the original message of this poem? How does she make it new?   The first change is in perspective.  While Wang An-Shih's narrator laments the northlands he cherished long ago, Melita's narrator is experiencing her "first" winter away from her beloved mountains.  Instead of the white hair of old age, Melita's narrator has "Eyes purple-shadowed," as if she were still weary from a recent journey; her mountains are "far-off" in distance, not in time.  Though Melita uses Wang An-Shih's form, she brings in her own experience to tell a new story.

But my favorite departure from the original piece -- and the point where Melita truly creates a new poem, I think -- is in the third line.  While Wang An-Shih commands pity for the new moon, Melita urges the reader to "Pity these poems" -- "all those black spider words" that fade into nothing. With the change of one word, she broadens the scope of the piece in an extraordinary way. Suddenly, it is not just beauty that has been squandered, but the very words from the narrator's pen. Both Wang An-Shih's and Melita's narrators may write volumes about their yearning, but neither of them will get their mountains back. This is the core tragedy of the original piece, the tragedy that Melita carries over so well. Her last image of the bare branches reaching to scar the clouds seems to echo the futile reach for something that can never be attained.

Too much analysis? Maybe.  Melita probably didn't plan each sentence this meticulously when she wrote "First Winter Here" -- in fact, few of us make all these connections when our words are first flowing onto paper.  But Melita -- like many of our other Slammers -- has great intuition for shaping a well-known work into something new, and we can all sharpen our own instincts by taking a closer look at what makes her poem work.

Is there a famous poem that you've always loved? Or one that you've always wanted to shift into another place or time?  Now's your chance! Get into the idiom of one of your favorite poets, and send us your best imitative work (with a note, of course, telling us what inspired you).  And remember, not all inspiration is derivative. What starts out as a parody or a tribute to an existing poem might take you down a new path entirely. Lose yourself for awhile in a great poet's writing, and you never know where you'll end up!

Cheers,

Ann Pedtke
Slam Master