Loved the essay; had a surprisingly negative emotional response to seeing what feels like unnecessary cruelty to poetry at the end though!
The act of taking someone else’s poem, changing a mere three words of it (in a way that is both unnecessary and aesthetically detrimental) and then crediting oneself as the author feels icky.
Would the unbastardised verse from Invictus by Henley himself not have worked here?
“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.”
I found Kenzie’s version of it moving specifically because of the deliberate difference and wouldn’t have felt motivated to include the original at all. I do realize it doesn’t actually change the semantic content, but it felt surprisingly poetic on it’s own and connected it more clearly to other ideas I cared about.
But, I wasn’t at all trying to deny Henley credit and have added him there.
I would want to remind any reader of poetry that vast swaths of poetry lift entire lines, structures, and meters from other poems. This is not a new thing to be done in the space of poetry and I found that this version of the poem respects the original by allowing the careful reader (such as yourself) to look up the original and compare the two.
Loved the essay; had a surprisingly negative emotional response to seeing what feels like unnecessary cruelty to poetry at the end though!
The act of taking someone else’s poem, changing a mere three words of it (in a way that is both unnecessary and aesthetically detrimental) and then crediting oneself as the author feels icky.
Would the unbastardised verse from Invictus by Henley himself not have worked here?
“It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate I am the captain of my soul.”
I found Kenzie’s version of it moving specifically because of the deliberate difference and wouldn’t have felt motivated to include the original at all. I do realize it doesn’t actually change the semantic content, but it felt surprisingly poetic on it’s own and connected it more clearly to other ideas I cared about.
But, I wasn’t at all trying to deny Henley credit and have added him there.
I would want to remind any reader of poetry that vast swaths of poetry lift entire lines, structures, and meters from other poems. This is not a new thing to be done in the space of poetry and I found that this version of the poem respects the original by allowing the careful reader (such as yourself) to look up the original and compare the two.