A Case for Self-Plagiarism
My first full-time job after graduation was, quite literally, shit. Creative writing degree in hand, I tricked my way into a position at a wastewater treatment facility which involved thousand-line Excel spreadsheets, incomprehensible error messages, trips down sewage wells, and a boredom so maddening I would later credit it for my eventual escape from the Midwest. For the most part, I sat in a sunless cubicle, barely doing my job, staring at the blinking cursor on a blank Google Doc to force myself to write. At the time, writing felt particularly inaccessible: I had just finished my poetry chapbook that took over a year, and I found my head emptied of words. In an interview with Poets & Writers, Louise Glück talked about the terrible stretch of her career during which she wrote “not a sentence,” but I wasn’t about to emerge from my stagnation with Glück’s Pulitzer-awarded Wild Iris. I had my shit job and the nauseating thought that I would never write another poem again.
In the same interview, Glück said that during her writer’s block, looking at her old work made her say to herself Look what you could do once, you pathetic slug. I already felt like a pathetic slug, so I thought looking at my old work couldn’t possibly make me feel any worse. I clicked around my folder that contained the drafts for my chapbook and found a poem titled “Kitchen Dance.” Even while I was writing that poem, I didn’t have much faith in it. “Kitchen Dance” indeed did not make the cut for the final manuscript—half because the title sounded dangerously close to “chicken dance,” half because the poem relied too much on sentimental declarations. Upon rereading it, I could see all its disqualifying flaws. I winced at a clichéd comparison of the speaker and their grandmother moving side by side in the kitchen to a “waltz,” the memed-to-death trope of Asian caregivers offering fresh fruits in place of verbal expressions of love.
But my brain snagged on a single image: the grandmother at the stove, “a halo of garlic bulbs” hanging above her head. The “garlic bulbs” juxtaposed against “halo” subverted religious associations. There was no adjective, but “halo” itself glowed: with the garlic’s silk skin, the kitchen’s fluorescent light, the white of the grandmother’s hair. I cut and pasted the phrase into a new document.
After spending so many months writing and rewriting, I felt like I had exhausted every original idea I would ever have. The pressure to continually reinvent myself as a writer was paralysing. Revisiting that old draft and finding that one image was like reaching into a coat pocket on the first day of winter and pulling out a $20 bill. I wanted to replicate its freshness and excitement. It was adapted from a real scene: my own grandmother in the kitchen during the Lunar New Year celebration, hovering above several steaming pots. What else is in the frame?
I recalled, as a child, watching the women in the family crowd into a tiny kitchen while the men sat and watched soccer in the living room. What are the women holding? Dishes in soapy water. Bundles of fresh herbs. A chicken carcass stripped of flesh. All these images added to the setting, but I felt that only “chicken carcass” echoed the surprise of “garlic bulb halo” as it married the life-sustaining nature of food with the viscera of death. What are they doing with the chicken carcass? Simmering it, of course, until it seasoned the broth for the noodle soup. But that, too, felt expected. I returned to the “garlic bulb halo” and its implied white glow. What if I used “shimmer” instead? A wordplay on “simmer,” “shimmer” extended the suggestion of light, but also evoked the shiny sweat glazing their foreheads—the physicality of gendered labour. I kept asking myself questions as new lines spun around the preserved image like yarn on a spindle.
I would revise this poem many more times over the following year until it became unrecognisable from its foremother: free verse turned into couplets, the grandmother figure replaced by mother. I condensed the language from a prosaic style to more impressionistic strokes. A poem about familial love turned into one about the burden of domestic femininity. “Kitchen Dance” became “Inheritance” (a much less mockable name). But the thematic resonances—nourishment, generational trauma, illness—remained.
Poems do not have to be static. They are “Hands that can grasp, eyes / that can dilate” according to Marrianne Moore in the simply titled “Poetry,” a poem that she kept revising and rewriting throughout her career. Even in their published state, poems can continue to transform as the poet’s new experiences and insights reframe and reimagine old images and metaphors. Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, an autobiographical book-length prose poem, was republished twice and expanded from the original 38 stanzas of 38 lines to 45 stanzas of 45 lines, aging and growing alongside her.
Writers are vultures. We eavesdrop, steal traits from friends and family, mine our own trauma. So why not give ourselves the permission to recycle our discarded attempts? Even if you consider a poem a failure—as I did the original version of mine—something compelled you to write it in the first place. Next time you find yourself falling asleep at your desk, or pacing the room in search of a spark that won’t come, try fishing around in the recesses of your laptop or the crumpled drafts under your desk. Perhaps burrowed in there is a seed for your next poem, dormant and waiting for you to germinate.
Chicken photo by T. E. Williams, via Flickr
