The Cosmic Poem, or My Fear of Plagiarism

I don't know if this should be one post or two, because the first idea I have had for a while, and I've been meaning to write it down somewhere I can access it again. And that place is here:

The Cosmic Poem

This is a new approach (for me) to writing poetry, and it has something to do with Plato, but I'm not going to explain that connection except that it means I draw my poems from the ideal realm, the realm of pure thought and ideas. When I say I want to write the cosmic poem, or that I want all my poems to be Cosmic (with a capital "C"), I'm saying that my poems ought to be the physical manifestation, on paper or on the screen, taking the form of letters in the English language, of some greater poem that exists in the Platonic realm of ideals.

Part of my inspiration comes from the various attempts throughout history of generating the cosmic religious text. This includes the Bible in English, most pertinently, because there seems to be an ongoing attempt to match the earthly published version of the Bible with some perfect, ideal version that Gleebzod has in his library in Heaven. It is not even certain whether the original written version of the books of the Bible in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek are the correct versions either. They do contain some spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, stylistic errors. So over the years, and into the modern age, it has been incumbent on Bible translators to make decisions as to the most correct version of the Bible.

This is how I feel it is with every poem that I write. I feel that I am writing down cosmic ideas onto an English page. Like the Bible translators, I do this with two states of mind held in suspension in my head as I write. I have hope that I can correct it to the point of perfection, otherwise why would I try? But at the same time I am utterly hopeless that the task will ever be completed. Let's be realistic, the Bible changes from year to year, and so will my poems as long as I allow myself to be obsessed by them. Do you see how I have two diametrically opposed ideas in my head, and yet I require both of them in order to be a Cosmic Poet?

Let me give you an example. A while back I was thinking about haikus, and I had been reading about haikus. And as I was thinking, a cosmic haiku just sort of popped into my head. The problem was, it was so perfect and so alien to me that I was sure I must have read it somewhere and just forgot I read it. Well, maybe this did happen, but I have not been able to find the original poem anywhere. In case you're curious, here is the haiku:

So many coins lie
at the bottom of the pool;
one is made of gold.

Pretty standard imagistic haiku, if you ask me. I do tend to leave out season words from my haikus, but that's my own stylistic choice. The point is, as soon as I wrote this poem down, I was sure I had read it elsewhere. It was just too perfect. It was alien. It was cosmic.

And this is where my fear of plagiarism comes in. What if I did read this poem somewhere and simply internalized it? It really feels like someone else's poem, but as far as I can remember, I wrote it.

Anyways, if it is indeed my own poem, this is actually an effect I feel sort of good about, because it would indicate that I have reached a cosmic level with my poetry. I have come across a combination of words that the universe intended to be together, and I was merely the person who figured it out. This is my definition of Cosmic Poetry. And even if it does turn out that this really was someone else's poem that I happened to remember, I can still see the experience as something to look for in writing future poems.