Every Poem Has Its Ghost "Didn't I Write This One Before?"
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How many times have you written a line and admired it, only to feel an eerie twinge of writer's deja vu that begins,
"Didn't I write this once before?"
I know it happens to me repeatedly, and what happens next is a furious storm of second-guessing, culmininated by going through old poems trying to root out the suddenly familiar line, and what is worse, often finding it........and it's alright.
There isn't a soul among us who hasn't plagiarized himself and done it gleefully, innocently thinking the line akin to something slipped from a golden pen, and while we sit there feeling very smug it gradually dawns on us that what we're staring at, in truth, is nothing more than a recycled idea, and that too, is quite alright.
Why does this happen? Does it make
us less creative in any way at all?
I believe it happens naturally to anyone who writes more than a line or two in their lives, and it occurs and re-occurs because we each have unique perspectives and personal biases, individual lenses by which we view the world, and it is inevitable that there's recurrency. They're the shapers of temperament- and political and spiritual beliefs that usually will not change from Sunday to Sunday.
I guarantee that if Eliot himself were writing today, he'd continue to turn out lines with particular shades of loss and isolation, and would repeat himself, because that voice came from the bone, demanding to be heard. His lyricism would continue to resurrect themes that circumscribed his world, showed his point of view, and life as only Eliot understood it.
And what about repetition? Well, repetition is a fine thing in art---look at Warhol. Look at the Pope paintings of Francis Bacon and the religious themes of Gerarld Manley Hopkins knocking, knocking-- banging at the gates of heaven from poem to poem, painting to painting like their own ladders to God.
To repeat is to build and also to sharpen: that which is honed repeatedly, drawn along the surface of things until it's shaped, will eventually sing- but it requires practice- not unlike Chopsticks on a keyboard, and what pianist would ever say, "I've played that note. I must not play that note again." So yes, you may have written that line-- or one very, very similar-- but why does it recur? What theme or memory or ecstasy are you recreating, and how important are those ideas in order to throw one's voice, with all honestly, into the void?
I'd say it's imperative to become the instrument for that which is playing through you. Just like movies, we all have our own themes playing in the background of our lives, so it's silly to deny the flute if flute music represents you- and if you're Hip Hop, Reggae or Rap- you'll be humming bars to suit it, because it ties our life together all of a piece.
In our understanding of things with its strings of pain or happiness, longing or anger, is our own repeated message- and it's a message unrepeatable by anyone else. So go ahead, reinvent the wheel.......who knows.....it may be a better
wheel, a rounder or more fanciful wheel than any that's ever
conveyed the weight of being alive, and that's what it's about, you see: we are voices into the void--and it's big--
and sometimes, well---------sometimes we do echo.
....Maybe by repetition,
we'll have a ghost of a chance
...... of being heard.
