creatively unoriginal

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—is Lowell’s “Imitations” a model for the cre­atively uno­rig­i­nal era some perloffs and profs are hail­ing the advent of . . .

if all verse con­sists of vari­ant recom­bi­na­tions of past verse, as the first pla­gia­rist Orpheus liked to claim, then

aren’t Lowell’s bril­liant recon­fig­u­ra­tions of Leop­ardi et al

to be espe­cially admired and emulated—

but can anybody/everybody follow his exam­ple with equal success—

or is it Lowell’s unique expertise/craft/handling that makes these trans­la­tions so brilliant—?

(con­cep­tion or exe­cu­tion? con­tent or form? Koons or Hock­ney?)

you can’t down­load his tal­ents, or at least not yet—

as brilliant young poet and critic Michael Rob­bins observes of Lowell: “he could sculpt a stanza with a pre­ci­sion of tone, dic­tion, imagery, sound, & meter. . . ”

maybe stanza-​sculpting soft­ware will per­form that task for poets in the near future?

let the app do the cot­tage indus­trial dirty­work of composition—

com­put­ers can already prob­a­bly write more skil­fully than most poets . . .

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