added notes on revision, after listening to Judith Skillman at Dan Peters’ class, and thinking and reading Lynn Martin with Rilke during her time of great loss— and finding this page from Jane Hirshfield in Nine Gates, a book suggested by Terry Martin
“Beauty rakes its painted claws”
Lynn Martin, sHADOWmARK broadside
Poems, despite the ways they are sometimes taught, are not crossword-puzzle constructions; first drafts and many stages of revision, take place at a level closer to daydream. But daydream with an added intensity: while writing, the mind moves between consciousness and the unconscious in the effortless effort of concentration. The result, if the poet’s intensity of attention is sufficient, will be a poem that brims with its own knowledge. water trembling as if miraculously above the edge of a cup. Such a poem will be perfect in the root sense of the word: “thoroughly done.”
In the concentration of poetry, rhetoric not only reflects intention but shapes it: the clarity of the writer and the clarities of syntax, word choice, and grammar are not one-directional, but two. Making a poem is neither a wholly conscious activity nor an act of unconscious transcription—it is a way for new thinking and feeling to come into existence, a way in which disparate modes of meaning and being may join. This is why the process of revising a poem is not arbitrary tinkering, but a continued honing of the self at the deepest level. Yeats describes revision’s work in an untitled quatrain, epigraph to his 1908 Collected Poems:
The friends that have it I do wrong
when ever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
it is myself that I remake.
--Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, p. 16
Italics mine.
Jim Bodeen
No comments:
Post a Comment