love rinses its hair full of stars/starfish

Last night I finished Harold Norse’s collected poems, In the Hub of the Fiery Force. There was one experience reading this hefty tome (615 pages) that I found unusual. I kept having the feeling I’d read a line before, sometimes an entire poem. Now it’s typical for me to flip open a book and read a bit here or there (entire poems sometimes) then when I work my way through the book from first page to last find familiar the piece I’d read before. At first I thought that the most logical explanation for my little bouts of déjà vu. Then I came upon the second of the two poems to follow. And I recognized it immediately and knew the title of the poem of which it was a minor variant.

I’d thought “parapoem 35” one of Norse’s more successful surrealist pieces and used it to generate a text of my own. (Maybe I’ll post that at the LuvSet blog.) So I was primed and when “love rinses its hair full of stars” appeared I could locate “parapoem 35” in but a moment and compare. Since the poem appears under different titles and has a different first line in each case neither the contents page (poems by title) nor the index of first lines would have been much help.

Herewith I reproduce “parapoem 35” and “love rinses its hair full of stars” (Norse uses a variety of indents and spacing that I won’t try to duplicate):


parapoem 35

love rinses its hair full of starfish
the frozen hotel wears a collar of lips
we follow corpses into a lake
of newspapers and dead flags
flowers scream, images sprout from their sticky leaves
a voice proclaims: I ERASE ALL MEMORY!
a man bleeds in the mirror
a radio scratches the sky with raucous announcements
ice cubes take possession of Vesuvius
chimneys write news items in Persian Rose Smoke
a man comes out of the ground saying
WE HAVE SEEN THE WRECKS OF OUR DAMAGED BRAINS


*


love rinses its hair full of stars

the frozen hotel wears a collar of lips
we follow corpses into a lake
of newspapers and dead flags
flowers scream
images sprout from their sticky leaves
a voice proclaims: I ERASE ALL MEMORY
a nun bleeds in the mirror
a radio scratches the sky with raucous announcements
ice cubes take possession of Vesuvius
chimneys write news items in Persian Rose Smoke
a man comes out of the ground singing

Love rinses its hair full of stars


*


I typed them both to make sure I got everything, though they are so virtually the same that a mere copy & paste wouldn’t have missed much.

Differences: titles; in “love” the line “flowers scream, images sprout from their sticky leaves” is two lines (eliminating only instance of comma); in “para” the bleeder is “a man”, in “love” it’s “a nun”; in “para” the man “comes out of the ground saying / WE HAVE SEEN THE WRECKS OF OUR DAMAGED BRAINS” while in “love” the man is “singing” and what he sings is the title “Love rinses its hair full of stars” (italics in original); and, of course, “para”’s “starfish” has become “love”’s “stars”. If there are any other differences I can’t see them.

Norse notes that he wrote a series of “parapoems” while at the Beat Hotel in Paris. I presume, then, that “love rinses its hair full of stars” is a later revision.

This is the only instance in which I knew how to quickly find & compare a familiar-sounding poem with its earlier appearance. As I suggested above, I suspect there are other poems with twins or substantial pieces of recycled language. I don’t mean when the poet writes more than once about the same incident, I mean when the words are reused unchanged. I can certainly see reusing bits to create new effects (or to recreate old ones) but it seems to me the editor was remiss in including poems so nearly identical.