Gary Sange

Abstract for "Originality and Imitation: The Dynamics of Poetry"

IMITATION AND ORIGINALITY--there are many interesting instances of it in literature: instances of poets needing the same word, almost like security blankets or yeast, to engender freshness in most any context. James right had to use the word "DARK" in almost every poem he wrote; there's Yeats's obsession with "that" which may have revolutionized the potential in this little demonstrative article. Obsessions with certain subjects: James Wright's need to write about down&outers, Frost's burnt-down-farm-house-with-nothing-but-a-chimney- standing poems are everywhere in his Collected. Then there is the nearly conscious collaboration of Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver who were not only lovers, later husband and wife, but genre-swappers, she nominally the poet and he the famous writer of fiction, style-cross-pollinators, so that the lines between their fiction and poetry blurred, while each created a more complex hybrid while being open to the forté & style of the other. For instance much of Ray's poetry is made up of musical, very rhythmic dialogue, while Tess's prose has taken on his extraordinary plainness. I know this is a glib, skimpy comparison, but I want to lightly touch on a few exemplary instances of IMITATION AND ORIGINALITY before I try to explore my own lineage, especially the progressive influence of Yeats, Roethke, Plath, & Kinnell upon one another and to suggest something of their influence upon my own work.

To give more focus to what I'm trying to do here, I want to sieze on two, often connected literary devices, Invocation and Incantation, to set up a basis for comparison. And before that, it may be well to ask what invokers and chanters do, and how invocation and incantation may be connected as literary conventions.