The delicacy of editing poetry
This morning at the dining table in my friend's apartment in Brooklyn, I'm editing a collection of poems that I put aside for a few months.
I'm seeing the poems with fresh eyes. I can almost read them without remembering that I wrote them. But it won't last.
Every second that I spend with a poem is a step away from the point where a reader will approach the poem.
At first glance, there are a few obvious edits. But beyond that, it's dangerous to keep editing. I'm distancing myself from the reader.
With a poem, I invite a reader to have my experience.
The ideal would be if the reader and I were one and the same. We would have the experience together—see with the same eyes, hear with the same ears. This is what I really desire from my art—to escape solitude, to share my experience with others.
That ideal is not possible. Art is the next best thing.
A piece of art is a container to be filled with the artist's experience in a way that can be delivered to another person who can share, at least to some degree, in the artist's experience by opening the container and consuming its contents.
A skilled artist produces art that is closer to the ideal.
If I have written a poem well in the first instance, it contains as much as possible of the experience that inspired it.
If I edit the poem too much, I almost always damage it. Often without even noticing, I destroy an essential part. "Essential" in the sense that parts of a poem are not independent. They depend on each other to produce what I will clumsily call the "goodness" of the poem.
One reason why I fail to notice that a particular edit is an act of destruction is that poems have layers and I am focused on one layer while accidentally ignoring another layer. There is a layer of ideas—this layer causes a reader to regard the poem as humorous, witty, or novel in thought. There is a layer of musicality—this layer is of rhyme and rhythm. If I am considering editing a word and I replace it with a different word that benefits the ideas layer, it may detriment the musical layer.
As I am learning more about poetry, I am increasing my ability to create a "good" poem theoretically. In the same way that there is music theory, there is also poetry theory—rules and guidelines that, over time, poets have developed, presumably through trial and error, i.e., the first poet of all time did not have any theory to abide by; they somehow naturally created a poem.
When I first started writing poetry, it wasn't because I took a class or apprenticed under a master poet. It just occurred to me one day during my senior year of college that what I was writing would be better in the verse format of poetry rather than the paragraph format of prose, as if the beat of my heart or the universal rhythm played the instrument of my written words.
I don't write my poems sitting at a desk. I write them in the moment when an experience impresses upon me. In a way, the poems don't even come from me, they come from the moment itself and I am merely the lens that captures a snapshot, like a camera that renders the light exposure onto the film.
Elizabeth Gilbert gave a TED talk about "creative genius" in 2009. Here are some excerpts from the transcript:
"People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons" ... The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius ... They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work."
"I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." And then there were these times -- this is the piece I never forgot -- she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first."
I resonate with Ruth Stone. When I write a poem, it doesn't so much feel like I'm coming up with it. It feels more like the experience itself is saying the words and I'm the transcriber.
And this is another reason why editing poetry requires delicacy. In the moment, the divine experience tells me what to write. When I'm editing, I'm a mere mortal fumbling with a gift from the gods, trying not to mess it up.
All this has been an attempt to explain the several reasons why poems I edit often end up being worse than they were originally. I now try to edit each of my poems as lightly as possible. I even paste this quote from David Wojnarowicz at the top of my manuscripts to remember when I'm editing:
"When I write...I rarely do second drafts. I’ll do a second draft just to clean up typos and maybe a little shift in the structure, but I’ve always been attracted to the way that people who don’t know how to draw, draw. Their energy is so direct between the pencil and the paper and it’s not cluttered with bullshit style. I feel the more drafts you put writing through, the more you repainted the same painting, all the blood was taken out. It no longer had life in it. Anyway, I wrote this thing really fast."