unpredictablebijou
Peril!
- Joined
- Apr 21, 2007
- Posts
- 5,507
Slavish Imitation
It's a term I learned long ago within the context of traditional painting. Students of a particular era were often told that imitation of the works of the Great Masters was a worthwhile practice method for learning how to paint. For all I know, that concept may still be in place in the art education world. So they'd actually sit and paint an exact copy of the Mona Lisa, or a Rembrandt, or whatever, and I suppose it may actually have been useful, in its way, to learn color and brushwork by copying a master.
I've thought about that concept a lot, mostly because I think it's a cool phrase, whatever it means, and tried my own version of it in writing occasionally. But I hadn't really thought of it as applying to writing in the way I suddenly did last week, when I watched the biography of Hunter S. Thompson entitled “Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride.” It's excellent, by the way. As a young writer, Thompson apparently spent time laboriously re-typing the works of Faulkner and Hemingway and other writers actually word for word. Whole novels. He said he “wanted to know how it felt to write that well.”
That blew my damn mind. I have occasionally tried some imitative forms – writing in the style of this or that author, most of the time doing parodies (yes, MTVM, I see you) but the idea of just letting your hands and mind learn structure and sentence rhythm that way, in that exacting fashion, really blew me away.
This thread is not for diligently retyping all the works of Eliot. But it is a space for the imitative, the response poem, the dialogue, the attempts at a particular style, and of course, the parody and the homage. I got all inspired by this concept, so I thought some of you might as well.
There have been a few times when someone's work here – or elsewhere, for that matter - inspired me to want to respond in a similar style, or to address the same scene or the same issue. Wicked Eve's blog posts are so evocative that I've often wanted to write pieces in response to them, for example. I've been too intimidated by their vividness to try to respond, but maybe, if she lets me... So this can be a place for that too, acknowledging someone's concept and bouncing off of it with your own piece. I've seen some very successful “dialogues” develop between poets in threads around here.
But more importantly, one could focus on the "masters." The famous poets, the ones you most admire, most wish to emulate. So for example, pick a topic and address it in several different styles. How would William Carlos Williams describe this moment? What about Whitman approaching the same moment, or Brautigan or Raymond Carver or Byron or Gertrude Stein? Write about one thing from all those points of view, or others. Or respond to someone's work. Talk to Sylvia Plath about the whole Daddy thing; see if you can get her to feel better. Show Coleridge how to loosen up a little. Take Rumi to your Halloween party and see what he thinks.
It's a stretching exercise. A game. A conversation. No pressure. Just a new way to exercise.
bijou
It's a term I learned long ago within the context of traditional painting. Students of a particular era were often told that imitation of the works of the Great Masters was a worthwhile practice method for learning how to paint. For all I know, that concept may still be in place in the art education world. So they'd actually sit and paint an exact copy of the Mona Lisa, or a Rembrandt, or whatever, and I suppose it may actually have been useful, in its way, to learn color and brushwork by copying a master.
I've thought about that concept a lot, mostly because I think it's a cool phrase, whatever it means, and tried my own version of it in writing occasionally. But I hadn't really thought of it as applying to writing in the way I suddenly did last week, when I watched the biography of Hunter S. Thompson entitled “Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride.” It's excellent, by the way. As a young writer, Thompson apparently spent time laboriously re-typing the works of Faulkner and Hemingway and other writers actually word for word. Whole novels. He said he “wanted to know how it felt to write that well.”
That blew my damn mind. I have occasionally tried some imitative forms – writing in the style of this or that author, most of the time doing parodies (yes, MTVM, I see you) but the idea of just letting your hands and mind learn structure and sentence rhythm that way, in that exacting fashion, really blew me away.
This thread is not for diligently retyping all the works of Eliot. But it is a space for the imitative, the response poem, the dialogue, the attempts at a particular style, and of course, the parody and the homage. I got all inspired by this concept, so I thought some of you might as well.
There have been a few times when someone's work here – or elsewhere, for that matter - inspired me to want to respond in a similar style, or to address the same scene or the same issue. Wicked Eve's blog posts are so evocative that I've often wanted to write pieces in response to them, for example. I've been too intimidated by their vividness to try to respond, but maybe, if she lets me... So this can be a place for that too, acknowledging someone's concept and bouncing off of it with your own piece. I've seen some very successful “dialogues” develop between poets in threads around here.
But more importantly, one could focus on the "masters." The famous poets, the ones you most admire, most wish to emulate. So for example, pick a topic and address it in several different styles. How would William Carlos Williams describe this moment? What about Whitman approaching the same moment, or Brautigan or Raymond Carver or Byron or Gertrude Stein? Write about one thing from all those points of view, or others. Or respond to someone's work. Talk to Sylvia Plath about the whole Daddy thing; see if you can get her to feel better. Show Coleridge how to loosen up a little. Take Rumi to your Halloween party and see what he thinks.
It's a stretching exercise. A game. A conversation. No pressure. Just a new way to exercise.
bijou
