For my final project I have decided to do a modern day imitation poem of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I’ve wanted to do this since the beginning, but I was worried it wouldn’t constitute the equivalent of a ten-page paper. However, between studying the form of the poem and incorporating as many allusions and references as Eliot does, I think it will be more than enough work.
The imitation will be a poem about how our modern world is a wasteland but a different one than Eliot’s, complete with my own footnotes and/or double footnotes. To make this project interactive I will use the flipsnack tool Dr. Zee provided in the assignment tab. I think it could be really fun trying to make a book.
Finding academic articles about The Waste Land is not going to be hard, so I think the grunt of the work will be figuring out the technicalities of form and weeding through significant but uncorrelated mass of important current events to incorporate in my own poem (that is, without reading buzzfeed).
My research will be mostly on Eliot’s poetic form and how he uses that to work within the space of the poem. I want this imitation to mimic Eliot’s poetic style and technique, so that in and of itself will be very extensively researched. I’ll also do some archival digging to make sure that I use the same kinds of allusions as Eliot as well. For example, he briefly alludes to the German Unification Movement that led to WWII. Instead of that, I can talk about Crimea, for instance, in lieu of Russia invading.
This is going to be so cool. I’m excited for it 😀
I like the idea of creating a modern version of The Waste Land–one that tries to replicate the density and allusiveness of Eliot’s original, but uses images and sources that resonate today. This will only work, though, if you pack it with your own footnotes (as Eliot does) or perhaps even a double layer of footnotes (one in the author’s own voice, as Eliot does, and one posing as the editor of such a poem, as the editors of our anthology provide).
The other idea–to “respond” to The Waste Land as so many of the poets we’ve read have done–might work too, but it would seems less fitting for this kind of project. You would presumably not be bound by Eliot’s own poem and could write basically anything. There’s a lot of freedom in that, but it will also be more difficult to have it stand on its own. Any old poem can be a response to some idea of what you think The Waste Land is about; but a close imitation of TWL for the present would demonstrate a deeper kind of engagement I think.
What kind of research do you think your project would entail?
Solid revision so far, but I think the research should focus less on TWL itself, and more on situation your “response” within the broader history of responses to Eliot’s landmark poem. We’ve already read responses from Zukofsky, Williams, Crane, and others. Just a year or two ago a poet names John Beer wrote a book called–guess!–The Waste Land. I’ll share a copy with you during our conference. We’ll also talk about finding sources that address the long afterlife of Eliot’s poem. That’s the tradition your own poem will join.
We’ll also talk about the format: I think you should pull a Zukofsky and play up the scholarly quality of the poem, including footnotes, etc.