How to Be Happy #34: Pillage Poems
More and more these days we need distraversions [distracting diversions] that, to steal from Alan Strang in the play Equus, “bear us away!” Unlike for Alan, the phrase for me is not a euphemism for getting off but for escaping reality. One idea for how to do this, even if for a few minutes, came to me while reading Emily Temple’s Literary Hub article, “The 32 Most Iconic Poems in the English Language.”
Scrolling through the list reveals some very familiar titles (“The Road Not Taken,” “Because I could not stop for Death-,” “Howl,” etc.). The one that stopped me, though, was W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” Not so much the poem, which I do like, but Temple describing it as “the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English.” With that phrase, she provides a link to Nick Taylor’s 2015 Paris Review article “No Slouch,” which is subtitled “The widening gyre of heavy handed allusions to Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming.’” In his opening paragraph, Taylor notes several article and book titles that incorporate Yeats’s iconic “slouching towards.” (To jog your memory, the famous last lines of the poem go like this: “and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”) Wikipedia alone lists 17 examples of well-known works that use phrases or lines from the poem.
These occurrences prompt Taylor to offer, tongue-in-cheek I presume, this contemplation: “A casual reader might wonder why the nations of the world have such terrible posture; is it that the earth is slouching towards bedlam? Have things fallen apart?” To Yeats, the world had fallen apart when he wrote the poem in 1919, not long after the horrendous bloodbath of World War I ended.
Leaving aside the answer to that question today, which is a given, I focused on this paragraph:
“The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, in mediums ranging from CD-ROM games to heavy-metal albums to pornography. These references have created a feedback loop, leading ever more writers to draw from the poem for inspiration.
The line, again, that most attracts me is that “most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English.” It suggests an excellent distraversion: poetry pillaging. Granted, the term “pillage” has a negative cast, meaning “to acquire by stealing.” But no big deal, right, at least regarding purposely performing a picayune procedure of poetry pillaging? Pablo Picasso did say that “bad artists copy, great artists steal” (or was it Igor Stravinsky or William Faulkner or Steve Jobs?). Nick Douglas, author of “An Artist Explains What ‘Great Artists Steal’ Really Means,” says that such stealing is not stealing but a form of inspiration (as Taylor also noted): “When you’ve truly transformed and elevated someone’s idea, an informed audience could look at both works and say yours explores a certain idea better. You ‘own’ that idea now. So you’ve stolen it!”
This type of pillaging sounds fun and will definitely work to distravert me. Let’s try it, shall we? Going back to Temple’s list of iconic poems, I close my eyes and point. My finger lands on Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” The first step in poetry pillaging is to find the perfect line to steal. This one pops right out: “Shun the frumious Bandersnatch.” The second step is to pillage. Here are several ways one might do that for this line:
- Write a book called “Shunning the Frumious Bandersnatch.” This work could be about anything — from avoiding hopeless quests to find the last living member of an obscure species to learning how to keep from becoming an infamous gossip.
- Start a band and name it “The Frumious Bandersnatch.” I’m not sure what type of music it might play but I’m fairly certain it would involve an eclectic combination of instruments — an accordion, kazoo, and didgeridoo, perhaps?
- Design a line of “Frumious Bandersnatch” clothing and then build an ad campaign around shaming anyone who shuns it.
- Start a church called the Holy Order of the Frumious Bandersnatch (HOFB) and institute “shunning” as the primary ritual performed during each service. It strikes me, though, that the HOFB might be difficult to maintain if the main form of worship was members excluding each other from all social interaction.
- Get busy coining sentiments for which “shunning the frumious bandersnatch” would serve as a euphemism. To go back to Alan Strang (sorry, Alan), instead of saying “that boy is being born away much too often,” one could say, “that boy has been shunning the frumious bandersnatch way more than anyone should.”
I think this is working. I’ve managed to amuse myself for at least 30 minutes while banning all thoughts of the outside world. Becoming a punctilious practitioner of poetry pillaging might do that for you, too. And if that doesn’t make you happy right now, what will?
(Published originally on RatBlurt™, May 25, 2022.)
