Carboanion is such a good prompter! She asks me why is Hugh’s Gapingvoid one of the reasons why I blog. Some literary critics, like Harold Bloom, say that the creative impulse is the wish of outshining your influences. It’s very Oedipal: the artist is the child, the influence is the father, and Art is the mother. It would be more appealing if it wasn’t such a male-oriented scheme.

I didn’t start a blog because I want to do it better than Hugh (heh), but he made blogging look like a good idea, not just a watered-down version of the online teenage journal. And regarding poetry, that Oedipal triangle is exactly the way I feel. I write because somebody got there first and said it better than I could. I used to despise T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland because in each line I read “I want to be Dante, and I can’t”. My own personal list of Dantes is a long one, but we could start with e. e.cummings.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, misteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Jajajaja, confieso que he tenido que buscar prompter en el diccionario, del mismo modo que nunca creí que terminaría leyendo poesía en inglés... Aunque los versos (que copio en inglés para no ofender a nadie con mis traducciones un tanto libres) "though i have closed myself as fingers,/you open always petal by petal myself" ofrecen una imagen que me ha gustado mucho.

Estoy de acuerdo contigo en que el impulso creativo surge a raíz de las influencias, ya que estoy convencida de que nos apropiamos de aquello que nos gusta y no podemos evitar adaptarlo un tanto a nuestras propias necesidades. Al menos, tengo un amigo que asegura que los párrafos que selecciono de los libros, son aquellos que se ajustan a mi propia filosofía... ¿Para qué decir lo que ya se ha dicho de manera más hermosa? Pues para que también sea nuestro y no sólo de ese autor que sabe expresarse mejor :P

Perdón por este segundo párrafo, se me ha ido un poco la pinza :$ Besos