revision & its discontents

a few days ago i emailed a poet friend and asked, 'do you do much revision'? short answer: no. my friend detailed his writing habits and how he likes to compose slowly and allow the poem to wander and make its discoveries as he teases out and delves deeper into the subject matter. he is the sort of writer that creeley called olson, 'maximus'.

i'm nearly opposite in that most of my poems are pretty short, a 'minimus' sort of poet. but like my friend i don't do much revision. i write my first drafts fast and make changes as i go. when i was in my apprentice stage i revised all the time. it is an addicting process. i also wrote mostly in longhand. which is awful, my handwriting i mean. i do keep a moleskin but most of my writing is done on the laptop. and my revisions happen on the fly of that initial pulse of writing.

what has changed is that i tend to think of poems in sequences, chapbook-length, as i compose. i'm presently writing a sequence that i think might go somewhere. i put two restrictions on this sequence, write late at night in whatever state i'm in, exhausted or not, and keep the lines to 5 in number. i don't have a theme in mind and i discovered that i'm using collage and outright quotes in the texts.

another thing has changed regarding my attitudes toward obsessive revision: i no longer think of poems as marmoreal, immortal edifices. they are more likely expressions in the process of living a life. my texts will be bumpy, fractious, good-humored, sometimes fluent, and often awkward. just like my life. or an approximation of my life. i don't believe in literary immortality, for me, or for anyone for that matter.

still, even with my sequence i think i'll need to do a bit of revision. and the poems i've posted here on this blog and saved in folders on my hard drive probably need some cleaning up. it is hard to take the obsessive out of the obsessive personality, right. one thing i've discovered in my life of writing/reading is that i've no idea where i am, we all are, heading. rather, i've learned to hang on and try to keep both hands on the wheel. soon as i think i've figured something out, i find out that there is still so much more for me to learn. i ask only to stay obsessed with my craft and sullen art, and not draw inward and cultivate an unnecessary crankiness. because everything is all wide open.