In Imitation

I came across a particularly fine and funny poem, The Poet of Bray, at the wonderful Poetry Archive the other day which made me think of the joys and perils of imitating others, especially in terms of the composition of poetry.

I remain baffled by the mania for originality. Certainly if one aspires to be a real poet (like the wonderful John Heath Stubbs, author of the above) there's a need to find your own voice, though trying on a lot of others can help enormously to get you to what you need to say, I suspect. But for those of us who simply seek to enjoy the writing of poetry, to do so under someone else's spell is part of the fun. It's also part of the sense of a community of voices.

Part of the problem lies in the way that natural participation in the arts, in terms of a kind of amateur hobbyism, has been prised away from people who in previous centuries would have gravitated to such activities, by those professional practitioners who want to keep their fields to themselves. I'm hoping that, possibly as a result of enhanced communication through the Internet and suchlike, young people, and even the old, will steal that participation back again.