Additional Imitation/Self-Analysis-"Not Waving but Drowning" by Stevie Smith

Not Hiding, Only Finding

He stayed far away north somewhere now, my old mentor,
But still I could hear him
"There ain't no use in wastin' a good heart on this cold world"
He is not hiding, only finding.

The old man, always trying to guide me
And now only in whispers
The horns and lights must have finally gotten the better of him
I think.

I read the news today, oh boy
(Still I hear the old man's voice)
I will desert the cold granite and steel
Not hiding, only finding.

I chose to write this extra imitation on a poem instead of a short story, mainly because I had not tried it before. I was interested to see how imitating the two forms might produce varied results. In Stevie Smith's "Not Waving but Drowning" there were several interesting elements to her writing that I chose to emulate. First off, the structure. Since poetry is a much shorter form than short fiction, and the structure is also often more intently crafted by the author, and therefore important to the piece, I chose to follow it here quite closely. Smith used repetition: both with important phrases and sentence structure. She does this to emphasize important parts, as well as to create a rhythm and flow. I did this as well. "Not hiding, only finding" is the phrase I repeat because I wanted to stress that the old one was escaping the city to find things he couldn't while still there. I include a lot of stuttered broken sentences like her too, with good examples being the first two lines of the first stanza, as well as the third and fourth lines of the second stanza. Next, I also attempted to emulate the mood, tone, and content of Smith's work, but in a very general way. Her poem is a consciously understated account of a tragic accident, done in a vague ambiguous way, and with implications of a deeper truth. I wrote mine in a similar vague manner, left it understated, and still wove it into a deeper meaning. The difference between writing imitations for poetry and fiction, is that with poetry, emulating the sonic elements and vague feel are most important.