Poetry and fan fiction
Jan. 13th, 2015 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sheenaghpughSo... what happened in the first place was that the fine poet David Harsent won the T S Eliot Prize yesterday. And another poet mentioned on Twitter that Harsent, if you please, used to write for The Bill, which I hadn't known! One thing led to another and said poet wondered on Twitter whether there was any "contemporary poetry fan fiction".
My first reaction was that, per se, this wouldn't happen because fan fiction centres on fictional characters and narratives, and contemporary poetry, mostly, doesn't; it tends to be ideas-focused. Poets themselves could be the focus of Real Person Fic (RPF) and there was, as I recall, a limited amount of Ted & Sylvia stuff, but that centred on their life, not their work - and there are any number of fics that use "Lady Lazarus" as a starting point for writing about fictional characters from other sources who had nothing to do with Plath or the poem, but that's standard practice. Older poets, like Byron, are obvious RPF/RPS candidates, see for instance "For Since Thy Lip Met Mine" by storiesfortravellers. I can imagine that some enterprising soul might have done a spin-off from Rossetti's Goblin Market, but that might just be my odd mind...
There is also, of course, fanfic poetry, and some of it, at least in the Tolkien world, is modelled on his style, which qualifies it as pastiche - and one must never forget the immortal Hamlet fic done in the style of Dr Seuss, Green Eggs and Hamlet.
But fan fiction based on characters from contemporary poetry, as opposed to based on poets, there is none, that I know of. I can't even think of any character in contemporary poetry who could generate it, partly because even if they existed they wouldn't be well enough known to communicate to an audience. The last "character", or more properly narrator, in poetry like that was Hughes's Crow, as far as I know; I can't think of one since.
Nice to know about Harsent's connection to one of fan fiction's most fruitful properties, though. And if anyone here does know of any other connections...
My first reaction was that, per se, this wouldn't happen because fan fiction centres on fictional characters and narratives, and contemporary poetry, mostly, doesn't; it tends to be ideas-focused. Poets themselves could be the focus of Real Person Fic (RPF) and there was, as I recall, a limited amount of Ted & Sylvia stuff, but that centred on their life, not their work - and there are any number of fics that use "Lady Lazarus" as a starting point for writing about fictional characters from other sources who had nothing to do with Plath or the poem, but that's standard practice. Older poets, like Byron, are obvious RPF/RPS candidates, see for instance "For Since Thy Lip Met Mine" by storiesfortravellers. I can imagine that some enterprising soul might have done a spin-off from Rossetti's Goblin Market, but that might just be my odd mind...
There is also, of course, fanfic poetry, and some of it, at least in the Tolkien world, is modelled on his style, which qualifies it as pastiche - and one must never forget the immortal Hamlet fic done in the style of Dr Seuss, Green Eggs and Hamlet.
But fan fiction based on characters from contemporary poetry, as opposed to based on poets, there is none, that I know of. I can't even think of any character in contemporary poetry who could generate it, partly because even if they existed they wouldn't be well enough known to communicate to an audience. The last "character", or more properly narrator, in poetry like that was Hughes's Crow, as far as I know; I can't think of one since.
Nice to know about Harsent's connection to one of fan fiction's most fruitful properties, though. And if anyone here does know of any other connections...
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Date: 2015-01-13 11:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-13 03:13 pm (UTC)