I opened a journal sometime in the last year pondering my use of quotations as markers in my life:
It is sometimes disturbing to me that I attempt to express myself in a shattered collection of out-of-context bits of language from others’ tongues. What am I but a pieced together quilt of the voices of my world?
When discussing Marianne Moore several weeks ago, we noted that she quotes everything from Shakespeare to National Geographic (and unlike Eliot, carefully notes all their original homes in the back of her collection). Some of her poems (“Marriage” for instance) seem to merely be the notes from a lifetime of avid reading cut up and pasted together. And, although intentionality and commentary emerge with deeper attention, her poetry foreshadows the found poem: a poem patched together from bits of language discovered in other places.
Annie Dillard, beginning her collection of found poetry entitled “Mornings Like This,” writes:
Excepting only some titles and subtitles, I did not write a word of it …
This volume, instead of presenting whole texts as “found,” offers poems built from bits of broken text. The poems are original as poems; their themes and their orderings are invented. Their sentences are not. Their sentences come from the books named. I lifted them. Sometimes I dropped extra words. I never added a word.
Moore and Dillard force me to consider whether I can write poems that are not ‘found.’ Aren’t most of my word combinations lifted from one of the hundreds of books, papers, poems I’ve read? The words at my command have all been used, are being used and will be used again. I can speak no sounds that have not already been uttered by somebody somewhere at some other time. I guess this could be rather depressing, but I tend to think not. I would rather agree with Eliot:
What there is to be conquered
By strength and submission, has already been conquered
Once or twice or several times, by men whom one cannot help to emulate
But there is no competition– there is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again.
I do not want to say something new. I want to say something that was lost, but now is found.
Rebecca
I agree to a point…but I think you really “do” want to say something new. As Pound said: “Make it new.” I think that’s what Moore wanted, and what Dillard wants. We will keep finding what’s lost…keep digging in that “dust” and pulling out the things we value. We’ll say “this was lost” and make it new as we bring it into the light of now. But as Eliot states: “there is no completion…” Just as Eliot, Pound, and Moore did it, Dillard must do it, and you must do it…and you (teacher that you are), will make others want to do the same.
That sounded a bit patronizing didn’t it? Sorry. Maybe it’s just semantics, huh? Thanks for indulging my soapbox.
No, I appreciate the comment. I think the distinction between “new” and that which is “rediscovered” could be a false one (if I am understanding your comment correctly?). My point might merely be that beauty and grace should be one’s goal in writing, not mere orginality (and the fame associated with it).
I like your image of digging in the dust.
And, the Eliot quoation is “competition” not “completion”– my copy error. Sorry.
R
Yes, and beauty and grace should, perhaps, also be the “basis” of one’s writing…where do those values come from that make you decide which things need to be dug up and brought into the light again in a new (maybe fresh) way? That always intrigues me…why did Moore choose the fragments she did? And Dillard? Why do certain things “stand out” in your mind in such a way to compel you to post them on your blog? You value beauty (and more aptly, Beauty), you value Grace. That holds my attention too. Thanks.
And well, I guess we’ll have to go with Mr. Eliot’s “competition”…I kind of liked the sense of “completion” there though.