Dorothy Parker was fun to read! (It was my first time, except for Resume, which most people know, I think.)"This is no sea of mine, that humbly laves
Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm.
I have need of wilder, crueler waves;
They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm."
"And if my heart be scarred and burned,
The safer, I, for all I learned"
"Should they whisper false of you,
Never trouble to deny;
Should the words they say be true,
Weep and storm and swear they lie."
Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm.
I have need of wilder, crueler waves;
They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm."
"And if my heart be scarred and burned,
The safer, I, for all I learned"
"Should they whisper false of you,
Never trouble to deny;
Should the words they say be true,
Weep and storm and swear they lie."
Note: Parker did a cool thing, which was to read some of her favorite poets like ee cummings and T.S. Eliot, then take a line or two from their work and begin her poems with those lines. That is probably something I will experiment with; I invite you poets out there to do the same!
2 comments:
I might try that. I've used bits and pieces of lines when parodying Blake, but rarely seriously. There is, of course, the slightly odd practice of creating poems entirely from bits of other poems, mostly as homage. On the other hand, I can never quite shake the feeling that someone's lawyers are magically going to appear from behind my computer and accuse me of copyright infringements. I get this even with the ones who've been dead a few hundred years, which probably says something about my state of mind.
I think with 1 or 2 lines, you're okay, but I know the paranoia of which you speak :)
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