Preface

Objective

I’ve always loved to listen to a band create a cover, their own version, of another’s song. I like hearing the new version become the musician’s own. I like to recognize the traces of its source, recall the original’s familiarity, but also be surprised with a new understanding of the music that only the new artist could have defined. The covering artist’s version is a tribute to and conversation with the original. How could I, as an author, write my own version of another author’s poem?

Sometimes a band covers another band’s music while attempting to sound as perfectly like the original as possible. That bothers me. Its live performance might be fun but as a recording, it bores and tells me little about the creativity of the musicians. Instead, I am thinking of music created and performed by musicians for the art of new music. The sort of thing that a listener seeks from attending a concert or purchasing an album.

I prefer listening to the musicians that transform and possess the music as if they were its source. Siouxsie and the Banshees did this wonderfully with their album of covers “Through the Looking Glass.” The album is wholly theirs in spite of each song having been originally recorded by someone else. They transformed the songs with their unique creativity. Listening to jazz musicians flow into well-known songs accomplishes this transformation anew every time. Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing Mood Indigo is a new experience from how we remember the original Duke Ellington version. The music industry continues to release new recordings of Bach. Hundreds of years printing copies of Bach’s music still does not force one orchestra to interpret it identically to the next. Sometimes a piece of music changes based on the instrument used to play it (a piano versus a harpsichord). Even a single pianist, Glenn Gould, performed Bach’s Goldberg Variations one way in 1955 but another way in 1981. Each of those recordings is well-known as distinct from the other.

A vibrant history of musicians learning and finding inspiration in each other, enculturates re-interpretations and re-definitions of what each musician originally created and expressed. Poetry, in spite of its own aural history layered with recordings of poets, abides re-interpretation somewhat less and somewhat differently. A person could read a poet’s work in a manner unlike the poet did or imagined. It feels amiss however to call that a cover. Listeners generally don’t receive the performance of a poem in the same way as music. It’s true that occasionally, someone sets a poem to music, which may qualify as a cover. Reading an author’s work during an event may be something like performing a cover. Yet for the most part, authors do not write cover poems the way musicians cover songs.

As libraries and bookstores attest, the books of poems on their shelves are unique to the authors that wrote them. Most of those books rest in the expectation that individuals will read the pages, to themselves. The shelves are not filled with “cover” poems because, for the most part, covering a poem the way a band covers a song would likely result in plagiarism. The rules enabling writing do not perfectly mirror the rules enabling music-making. Sequences of words do not function the same as sequences of notes.

For the most part, an author cannot transform written text with additional instrumentation, a slower tempo, or changes in pitch as a musician might do with a song. Excluding recitations, our poems are not performed but read directly by their audience. If I were to use phrases from another author’s poems within my own, I’d need to quote them. Copied writing is static; it does not permit authors to possess the text in a process akin to the way a melody can be distilled. Meaning and feeling move within the reader, interacting dynamically with the arrangement of words in the body of the poem but printed words do not move or change in time.

I have repeatedly circled back upon this problem of covering a poem. I kept wondering how I could get closer to the thoughts and experiences of authors that I admired. Could I re-create those written works in a way that transformed them into my own expression while honouring their original authors?

Method

I devised a solution to the problem. After selecting some poems (in two cases, excerpts from prose works), I sequenced all of the words from each selection into its own alphabetical list. Upon creating a list, I put the corresponding original text out of sight. I then set myself to writing a new poem, using my list of words. My rules for writing these cover poems were as follows.

  1. Every word of the original work must be used
  2. The words must be in my own order, rhythm, and phrasing.
  3. Words must be used as-is. For example, tenses cannot change, plurals cannot be made from singulars or vice-versa, etc.
  4. Punctuation is fair game.
  5. A word with multiple meanings can be used in whatever sense I want. For example “spring” can be a verb or various nouns.
  6. No new words can be introduced into the poem. Each poem must have the same collection of words as its original.

A different technique might be to recreate the sequence of thoughts, structure, and story or purpose of a poem but entirely in one’s own words. Maintaining recognition however of the original, proves challenging. The poem must refer to its source while introducing enough new variation to take possession of it. Too much variation or novelty would make the notion of a “cover” meaningless. My belief is that in not reproducing the phrasing, word sequences, or direct ideas of the original, I remove the possibility of plagiarism. Simultaneously, by using the words and only the words of the author’s original, I could enter into some of the sensation and thought patterns that an author had. I could apply my own grammar, create my own feelings, and convey new messages or ideas. These new poems needed their own meaning, stories, and impressions evoked through my own design.

Finally, I collected the poems together in this chapbook format to represent the poetic equivalent of an album. The concept for creating these poems is likely imperfect and I would be curious to learn of other perspectives on the method. A friend suggested that I put the poems side-by-side. To that end, enabling a possibility for review of the originals and critique on the technique, I’ve compiled the original source poems (or prose excerpts) on which I based their covers, in a separate appendix. Yet a year later, I wondered if it would be possible to examine the changes between the poem pairings in a way other than considering their meaning: visually.

Analysis?

Developing a visualization of poetry and in particular, distinctions between poems is a difficult project. There are many ways to visualize a poem computationally, for example by creating a word cloud (based on occurances of words) or rows of collocated words that show their proximity to other words or phrases. Visualization techniques such as these, which I see commonly used in digital humanities methods, would reveal very little about a poem's sound, its rhythm, implied meanings, and what surprises might be discovered in the spaces between its words.

Fortunately, I discovered a brilliant tool, Poemage1, which I used to visualize sonic topologies of the poems. These visualizations reveal connections, patterns, and areas of turbulence for each of the sources and the new poems. This method may help to understand more about how my processes for writing compared to the source authors' processes. The team of researchers that developed and then wrote about Poemage realized that they needed to visualize three significant aspects of a poem. According to the researchers, these aspects included the poemspace (visual structure including blank spaces), rhyme sets (in the common sense of a rhyme but also more broadly as sonic patterns connecting sounds), and sonic topology (the way the rhyme sets interact throughout the poemspace)2. From my perspective, these aspects could help to understand similarities or differences in the way the new poems covered their sources. The Poemage researchers stated:

“By approaching a poem, for the purposes of visualization, as a fluid moving via its linguistic devices and figures through a defined space, the flow metaphor captures three distinct levels of poetry analysis: the movement of individual linguistic and sonic devices through the space of the poem, how the interaction among such devices contributes to the complex sonic-temporal structure of the poem, and the impact that individual flows and collections of flows have on their surrounding region.3”

These are important characteristics that affect how a reader might hear and interact with each poem. They take us well beyond comparing the proximity or frequencies of words. In short, the sonic topology visualization technique is a good way to explore the experiment of this chapbook. I used Poemage to create visualizations of each poem that I wrote and its source. I did not use all of Poemage’s twenty “rhyme type” possibilities, which would be better left for individual exploration. Instead, I’ve focused on two: phonetic alliteration and phonetic assonance.

In Poemage, phonetic alliteration is defined as “leading consonants of [the] stressed syllable match in mouth placement” such as “pen/boy.” Phonetic assonance is defined as “vowels of stressed syllables match in mouth placement” such as “edible/anchor4.” I selected these types for several reasons. First, because they provided a mixture of vowel and consonant connections. Second, particularly with phonetic assonance, I felt that it could help to pick up on rhythms in the poems. Finally, I liked imagining a person reading a poem, silently mouthing a word, and knowing that the software accounted for that in its visualization.

A glance at the resulting visualizations immediately distinguishes between source and cover based purely on the shapes and colouring. Closer inspection may reveal more interesting characteristics. In the poem by E. E. Cummings (The wind is a lady with) there is less overlap in the beginning but much more toward the middle. Overlapping areas (the shaded regions between the lines) are “turbulent” according to the Poemage authors because these areas show where paths (the lines connecting words) intersect, overlap, merge, diverge, or emerge. I believe these may attract a focus or somehow stand-out in the body of the poem. My cover of this poem appears to have its turbulence more evenly distributed than the original. Does this tell me something about feeling, which is conveyed through these two poems? Does understanding the sonic topology provide any more insight to the source author’s state of mind in crafting his poem? Do I now have a way to talk about interpreting a poem’s baroque melody as a tango cover? Poemage inspires me, and I hope any person reading this, to ask such questions.

  1. Nina McCurdy and Miriah Meyer, “Poemage” (University of Utah, 2014), https://www.sci.utah.edu/~nmccurdy/Poemage/.↩︎

  2. Nina McCurdy et al., “Poemage: Visualizing the Sonic Topology of a Poem,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 22, no. 1 (January 31, 2016): 4, https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2015.2467811.↩︎

  3. McCurdy et al., 4.↩︎

  4. McCurdy et al., 5.↩︎