I Tried to Write a Poem Like Walt Whitman
What I came up with after a week of trying to imitate elements of Walt Whitman's poem, "Beat! Beat! Drums!"
Write! Write! Poets!
Write! write! poets!—bleat! qaris! bleat!
Through the food-filling of litter boxes and over-
spilling, through the unmet gazes of foreigner fear
and browning fruit scattered down ditches
into gutters—
no trolley should stay empty of needless
fattening fluff while broods of Martian mothers
are whittled away.
What hope can a man have in impure hands
raised at the altar
of himself if he cannot sacrifice for God his son?
Write! write! poets!—bleat! qaris! bleat!
Through cement still cold from winter,
into the unweeded soil;
to the dead branches behind forefront hedges;
to the moon at dusk the size of a fingernail,
past the White Days—
no creature of God should fail to bear witness
to these flesh flutes, mazameer of ‘aali Dawood.
Write! write! poets!—bleat! qaris! bleat!
Do not write what isn't yours to conceive—
ferrets cannot sing
songs of lyres and orioles as urchins do
not dig holes of gophers and voles.
O numb, stumped digits, how you grip in power-
lessness the pen!
O false, frigid folds, how you tremble in feeble-
ness and croak!
Salaams my dearest water buffalos,
Somehow it’s almost been three weeks since my last post. Truly, humans are in a great loss, as God says in surah al ‘Asr. I’m still stuck in the same woes of ten year old me, consumed by the dopamine dishing machine.
This poem was part of my homework assignment at House of Amal, where after compiling the first draft of our manuscripts, we were assigned two poems to write after different poets—one in a similar style, and one different. This is the one that I wrote based on what’s supposedly similar in style to my writing, but it turned out to be very different to how I normally write.
I chose to adopt a bit of a parodic and sarcastic tone in addressing myself as part of a group (poets and qaris) after struggling to come up with anything for a few days. It’s surprisingly challenging to copy another writer’s style. Here’s Walt Whitman’s poem:
So, how do you think I did in trying to copy him? Did anything in my poem even make sense? Did you get any of my allusions? Hint—there’s at least two very obvious allusions to hadiths and one to a prophet’s story. Let me know!
Peace out,
Walyullah
PS — Grace your ears with this entrancing Arabic poem sung by Mustafa Hamdo (and translate it for me too pretty pls):
I liked it heaps! It's definitely different to what you would normally write, but I feel like it had a rhythmic bounce (for want of a better word) to it. And my favourite part was the Nabi Ibrahim allusion :)
More broadly, I like the idea of imitating a poet for practice. Mary Oliver writes about this: in every form of art the budding artist is meant to imitate the masters (think painters, sculptors etc) before developing a style of their own. Yet in poetry people are usually taught to be original from day one whereas they should imitating the greats for a while before branching out and developing their own unique style.
I found yours overly florid, deliberately so I guess. Definitely energetic and enthusiastic. I rarely comment any more as it takes up too much time, I'm not getting any of my own work done.