Echoes and echoes and echoes and

Dear Void,

I’m warming up, like a microwave dinner, my aspiration to write a post every day (I heard you Seth Godin: get 'em out there!).

I’m thinking about the ways my subject had borrowed, translated and adapted the text of others and prior text. She did that almost as a methodology. When I first started I had an inkling that she did—making marvellous new work in the process—but it’s only now that it’s all revealing itself clearly to me. I may be delirious cos it’s the end of the day, but clarity is what I’m getting a hint of. I like it.

Today I unpacked my thesis (again). I ripped into some paragraphs that I’d written in order to flesh them out more. My methodology. ‘Subsuming reading into a composite site of …’ I won’t go on since I might be accused of plagiarising myself when this goes online and I hand in my thingo.

But it (today) was all about poetical echoes. John Hollander, in his book The Figure of Echo, says that ‘poems seem to echo prior ones for the personal aural benefit of the poet, and of whichever poetic followers can overhear the reverberations.’[i]

^^^

Reflection on thesis management and administration >>>(I wanted to practice using Endnote’s CWYW [Cite While Your Write] feature but that’s when I realised I didn’t have the reference I wanted. So, I went to our library catalogue, searched for the record, downloaded the RIS, et voila! Citation-ability! However, I can’t find a way that allows me to add page numbers, I thought I had yesterday. So, glitchy.)

16:42 Thursday. On my desk. Oh, no! It's always this organised!

My thought for the day is: It’s impossible to be so superconscious of what you are doing when you write that you might as well freeform and then rewrite iteratively later. By ‘later’ I mean like at the end of the day or at the end of a short period of time, so you’re still in touch with the initial impulse but with a little distance to be able to form, smoosh and shape the text into something that truly comes from your own thinking.

In 2019, when I began this doctorate, I went back to visit some material that I used as I worked on Lady Mary’s commonplace. And I saw, then, that I think I stole from her a line that I really thought was my own. I think now I was probably responding to hers, and I wish I’d written down that process.

Anyway, here’s Lady Mary’s line (from her delicious poem ‘This once was me’):

'Tis said, the Gods by ardent Vows are gain'd,

Iphis her wish (however wild) obtain'd,

Pygmalion warm'd to Life his Ivory maid,

Will no kind power restore my charms decai'd?

And here’s mine:

 

as pygmalion warms his wretch [to life] like a microwave dinner

a homily so adamant to strut a peacock strut, made pulp 

pressingly set a broad frame of reference — gilt —

I took her personal to make my impersonal. An assembly of wretches, we.

 

Thanks for listening, Void.

Jx

 

PS. My poem was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize in 2019. Only the first and second placed poems get printed. Mine is still in manuscript form.

PPS. If you scrolled through this post to the end here without reading it, Chat’s gotcha covered:

Someone is writing a lot and trying to write something new every day. They're thinking about how other people's writing has influenced them and how they can use it in their own writing. They also talk about organizing their writing and using a tool to help them cite their sources. They share a poem they wrote and talk about a line they took from someone else's poem without realizing it. They also share that their poem was almost a winner in a contest.

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[i] Hollander, John. The Figure of Echo : A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After. University of California Press, 1981.