How to be Original #1: Steal!
This article is for: Everyone!
One of the main things we expect from good poets is for their writing to be “original” and “unique.”
We think that the best writers create work entirely by themselves, and work that only they could make.
And if you’re trying to become a “good” poet, this may seem a tall order.
There are just so many poems and poets out there already—how can you write about something no one else has ever covered? It’s got to be impossible, right?
Well, if you think like this, I have some good news for you:
Actually, no one is original—and at the same time, everyone is original.
I’m going to explain what I mean by this in two articles. In this article, I’m going to focus on the first of those truths:
All poets steal from other poets—but we can use this to be original!
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We all steal
There’s a famous saying from T. S. Eliot that goes:
"Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal."
What did he mean by this?
He meant that we all take things from the other poets that we read.
When we’re learning, what we’ve taken is obvious: our poems look and sound like the poets we’ve read.
For example, I just went through my attic and cleared out a lot of junk. On the way, I found the books of my earliest poems. The first ones all sound like Thomas Hardy, who was my favorite writer when I was about 16-18; then from age 19 they all sound like Philip Larkin!
What they don’t sound like is me. They are clearly “borrowed,” in style and subject matter, from those two great masters.
And this is perfectly OK. When we’re learning any craft or skill, we need good teachers to copy from, to see what they’ve done and figure out how to do it ourselves.
But as we get more skilled, we learn to hide our influences, and at that point we start “stealing.”
Stealing in life means taking something from someone else and making it your own. And if you're good at it, you don't get caught!
Stealing in poetry is very much the same: it means taking ideas or approaches from other poets, and making them your own, so that no one knows you didn't invent them.
(T. S. Eliot said when good poets do this, they "make it into something better, or at least something different.")
And notice that Eliot didn’t say “some poets steal” or “only really bad poets steal.” He meant that all poets steal.
Every good, seemingly-original poet you read has learned their skills by borrowing from others. They’ve just learned how to make their borrowings look like their own.
How can you do that too? I'm going to suggest three options.
1. Give it a paint job: Steal and Disguise
The most obvious way to make an idea or technique your own is to do basically the same thing but make it look different. (Like putting new paint on a stolen car, perhaps?? Not that I would know...).
So you might keep the form of a poem, for example, but change the topic, the voice, the point of view, or indeed anything else that moves it a little away from the original.
For example, consider Tracy K. Smith's "The United States Welcomes You." The poem is made solely of questions, as an unnamed authority figure, who is probably white, asks a series of questions to another unnamed person, probably immigrant and/or black. (It’s a great poem by a great poet—read her Life on Mars for proof!)
Based on this poem, I recently set a writing exercise in which poets made their own poems using all questions—in other words, “stealing” Smith’s technique.
But they did this in their own ways.
One person asked the questions of an abstract figure of Time, making his poem a metaphysical musing.
Another varied the form by including two speakers asking questions.
Another stuck to one questioner but changed the type of voice, making it a teenager asking questions of her Dad after the parents had separated.
All of these approaches gave a "twist" to the idea, and therefore came out as original poems, not imitations.
(I should probably note here that I’m sure Smith didn't invent the all-question form either—she stole it from someone in her turn!)
2. Get steeped in crime: Steal Twice
This is my favorite stealing method—go on a crime spree and come home with a bulging swag bag!
In this method, you take ideas or approaches from two poets (or more, if you're brave) and then combine them in a new and unique fusion.
For example, last year I read James Wright's Shall We Gather At The River. Suppose I steal his directness and clarity of statement, and his self-denigrating, melancholy tone, and mix that up with Tracy K. Smith's all-questions form? I might get this:
Daughter, why do you look back at me
with so much fire?
Don't you see
I don't know how to fix it all
either?…
I think I can argue that this poem is shaping up to be neither James Wright nor Tracy Smith, but my own creation.
Or what if I mixed James Wright with Zoe Mitchell's work in her book Hag, where she often uses mythological figures to investigate contemporary psychological and social situations? I might get this, about the Windigo, a Maine folk legend:
The woods are empty of everything
but me, and even they
aren't void as I am. Blank, blank
snow. Do I leave tracks here? I guess
I do. Some twigs bent, some blood...
This is more James Wright than Zoe Mitchell, but he didn't inhabit mythical figures, so again it's my own thing, not his or hers.
I hope you get the picture: bang two ideas together, and you can make a whole new form or approach that's all yours.
3. “Run for it!” Steal and Abandon
Sometimes thieves don't keep what they take—they use the goods for a while, then ditch them (like joyriding cars).
You can do this too!
You can take what you need from a poet's approach to get your draft started, but when you've gotten a certain distance, leave the other poet's ideas behind and start using just your own.
For example, in the Tracy K. Smith poems I mentioned earlier, the writers generally figured out that, after a while, they were best off forgetting about using only questions, and adding direct statement again. The questions-only form helped them to create their idea and start the poem, but after a while it was either not needed any more or actually obstructive.
So they left it behind. Thus, the resulting poems won't look much like Smith's poem, even though they started by "stealing" from her.
So feel free to start with another poet’s approach, knowing that you’re going to do your own thing in the end.
Next Steps
Choose a book by a poet whose skill and originality you admire. Pick out a poem you especially like.
Note down a technique and an idea or topic that you see in the poem.
Repeat this with another poem in the book.
Then do steps 2 and 3 with another book by a different poet.
Now you have 4 techniques and 4 ideas/topics. Make a random choice of two of these (but not two that came from the same poem!).
Write a poem that uses this new combination—which is totally stolen, but also all your own!
