Friday, October 14, 2011

Forged in smithy of my soul

*Author's note: A college professor once said to me, after analyzing a famous James Joyce quote, "Amateur poets borrow, master poets steal." I have embraced this concept and taken lines from four authors, re-organizing, altering, and re-writing their lines into a poem. Can you identify the author's I have committed forgery from? To add to the challenge of creating a unified theme from multiple sources (which in itself was was difficult) I wrote the poem to fit 1.5'(x3) 2'(x4) 2.5'(x5) 3'(x6) in a stress-unstress rhythm.

I am life:
Live, and breath
Think, and feel,
See. So be it.
Welcome, life, I
go, the millionth
time, I go to life
and to forge within
more than soul, my hope,
poems, and dreams. To tell
and create my own
life, my conscience, my
sight. For I, being poor, have
only dreams. Oh, dreams have
I. For tis not we but
those who come, make legends
of our treading be-ing,
poems and dreams and songs and
life. And I am spelled by art.

2 comments:

  1. Reminds me of the final scene of "Equilibrium." In a good way.

    I think it was G.K. Chesterton who said "A good novel tells the truth about its subject; a bad novel tells the truth about its author."

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  2. Haha, that's actually what inspired it. After watching it, I had "He wishes for the clothes of heaven" stuck in my head with the lines, "I am life. I live, I breath, I FEEL". So I took that and a few other authors works. I like that quote, it coincides with what James Joyce said when he commented that a good author takes a subject, removes what is unimportant, and separates oneself from the equation. A successful artist expresses themselves, though detached from the subject.

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