Some time ago I posted one of my poems on this website as a work in progress. I thought of it as an experiment in editing, in developing a poem into some sort of final form within the more 'public' space of this blog. I posted the poem intending to work on it in this more visible context but did not follow through. I was unhappy with the poem in some sort of vague way, couldn't find my way to a more satisfactory version, and just let it lie there, on virtual display. The poem lay fallow for months, until I finally and perhaps a bit reluctantly took it down, demoting it from 'published' to 'draft' status on this blog.*
Meanwhile, I found a way forward. Following the death of poet Louise Glück, PN Review 274 published a commemorative note by Philadelphia poet Daisy Fried, on getting poems right:
I remember going to her readings a number of times, and one particular Q&A, maybe at Bryn Mawr, when she gave some advice about revision, wherein she said that with drafts she wasn't happy with sometimes she would take the ending of the draft and put it in the middle of the poem and then keep on writing from there. This blew my head off, poets. I've passed that suggestion along (with credit) ever since. It doesn't always work, but it often does.
I took that advice and was happy enough with the result to read the poem at last year's annual meeting of The League of Vermont Writers. Here's the revised version -- still a work in progress -- with 'help' from Louise Glück via Daisy Fried:
Where does memory live?
A clutch of elk
The forest door
Light tilting
Against a thickening sky
The gloaming
Tentative
then flaring
touching
nose
tail
flank
Voices pitched at low thrum
"Indefiniteness is an element
Of the true music"
says Spicer
the poet
Cut from blue metal
inchoate
tumbling
Shavings drift to the floor
smoking
coalescing
clustering
uniquely forming
this one sentence
Clacketyclacketyclack
clattering
riving
my dream
Planetesimals whirr the dark
Seventeen billion
spheres
Cut from hard metal
Seventeen billion
trees
In a red-shifting forest
Our names carved
into just
this one
tree
Walking these streets
Shadows blot the sun
I'm a cotton weevil
Caught in a loose cotton weave
Unbuttoning one ear
I hear the muttering voices
Of the jabberwocky elk
Dreaming
Riding bareback through the forest
I taste the trail in my mouth
And think to write this down
Having re-posted the poem, I wonder whether the poem is 'finished'. I tend to cover, listing any given poem as a 'work in progress', such as perhaps all poems may/must necessarily be. That thought back of mind, I opened the current issue of PN Review (No. 279) this morning, and read an appreciation by the editor of his longtime collaborator and fellow poet Stanley Moss, who died recently at age 99:
Often he would complete a poem and then follow on with three or four revisions: these sequences are editorially fascinating. He was profligate in discarding memorable lines, heaping up darlings like Herod's babies. He usually knew when a poem, whether his own or those of his authors, was finished.
Stanley Moss 'knew' when a poem was 'finished'. As editor who would publish one or more of Moss's poems from time to time, he might be in a position to comment on the poet's skills; on the shared challenges poets must face:
My occasional complaints were with his syntax, his sporadic doggerelish rhymes, and sometimes with enjambments, line and stanza breaks.
Enjambment! Yes, I know.
But there's more. Extrapolating now... The Thinking-About-Gladys-Machine is a fascinating collection of early stories by the Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero, in a new translation by Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter, published by & Other Stories (www.andotherstories.org) and offered by Asymptote Journal through their translation book club (www.asymptotejournal.com). 'The Abandoned House', one of the stories collected here, comprises brief sections, each detailing the experience of a 'select few people who fall under its [the abandoned house] influence'. In the final section, 'Ants', the narrator conjures a solitary ant occupied with building a mysterious structure out of "little sticks and other small objects'. Archie the engineer in their group believes 'it's a giant engineering project' that will 'help him to revolutionize bridge-building techniques'. But the narrator thinks otherwise:
She uses them all to build something that isn't a nest; we don't know what it is, and for the ant it seems to serve no practical purpose. She walks about on it, enraptured, then forgets the whole thing, and returns, for a while, to her contemplative state.
What to make of this? The narrator:
I don't think they're bridges; I have my own views on the matter. Everyone uses magnifying glasses, everyone focuses on the detail and praises the meticulous work and delicately balanced little sticks. Personally, I prefer to see it as a whole and say that it's beautiful, and that its shape is not unlike that of an ant.
...
*I'm 'republishing' the original version of the above poem, which can be read at my blog post dated October 22, 2021.