Essence and similarity

Sitting on a bus today I found myself wondering if you can write anything without being influenced by things that you have read to a greater or lesser extent?  Since starting my series of domestic poems I have been reading Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec and Recyclopedia: S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge by Harryette Mullen. I had already read quite a bit of Charles Simic and Vasko Popa.  I am not consciously emulating any of these writers in my work, but I do believe that we are (at lease subtly and sometimes more so) influenced by the things that we have read - especially if we find them inspiring - if they speak to us in a language that excites us and that we can relate to.

What is interesting to me is that some of the earlier poems in the domestic object series have a similar sound and feel to some of the pieces in Tender Buttons - and these were the ones that I wrote before I started reading it. This led me to wonder whether there is some innate quality in these inanimate domestic objects that is somehow tapped into and embodied by anyone who tries to tap into the essence of them through writing.  If you try to capture the true essence of an object is it inevitable that there will be some similarity to other work where the writer has tried to do the same thing?  Does this similarity make the work any less valid?

Capturing the essence

 a photo by pupski on Flickr.

If you are trying to capture the essence of a thing in a few lines is this enough of anything to be a poem? I am not sure that it is. If you have a few short pieces together is this enough to be a poem? Maybe, but I am still not sure. Are these short vignettes more satisfying for the writer than the reader? Is it merely an indulgent exploration of the it-ness of things, or is it something more?

Today I have been thinking about vegetables - writing a series of small pieces: each one focussing on a vegetable, and each one short - maybe one, two or three lines long.  I am not entirely happy with all of them yet. i wanted to capture the essence of the thing, but not be too obvious. That makes the process sound a lot more deliberate than it was.  To begin with it was a little more like automatic writing - but that makes it sound less deliberate than it was.  I have changed some words that didn't sound right or that I had repeated too often. It was an interesting exercise. One thing I discovered was that the same words kept coming up over and over (hence the changes) and that overtly foodie words started to creep in too - words like sweet and flavour.  These words are OK in moderation, and the spontaneous nature of the pieces means that I don't want to change too much.  I think I will write a few more and see how (or if) they all hang together. If nothing else it is an interesting experiment.

Lost in Translation

I am wondering as I am reading translations of poetry by Jacques Prévert and Georg Trakl how much of the original essence of a poem is lost in translation. In a sense the translator is writing the poetry him/herself just using a set of words gleened fronm the original work. For example when a friend who could read German translated one of Georg Trakl’s poems aloud he translated it word by word and it was very different to the translation in the book. In fact in these translations words have been changed for poetic effect. It makes me wonder if as a reader I would want a direct translation from the German or am I happy to read the artistic interpretation of the author’s work by another poet (in this case Robin Skelton). If I read ten different translations of the same poem done by different translators how different would they be from one another? Would I find myself reading ten completely different poems or would the essence of each poem be essentially the same? For me as a reader I think I might like to see a direct word for word translation as well, just to satisfy my artistic curiosity.