i just finished writing a collection based on neruda's Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, and now i've started to work on a collectoin based on whitman's Calamus. the pieces on neruda were all sonnets, though of the contemporary kind, i.e. in the berrigan tradition, so the main parts that are left are the line length, 14, and the volta (though i often switched the place). i'm sure this comes out of the research i did for a paper i recently presented at the mmla in st. louis. the whitman pieces look more like my typical open field poems.
a few years ago, i wrote a response to dante's vita nuova in my long poem "go-between." the neruda pieces are like the ones on dante in that they do not easily correspond to the originals. they are not inspired by the originals; rather, they respond in some way that is related to my experience.
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