[Max Goodman]

Another thread intriguingly addresses how time alters our feelings about others' poetry. I imagine our feelings about our own change, too. Peter Porter (I think it was) wrote that his had changed so much that rewriting early poems would be like rewriting the work of another poet. He felt it unfair (or unwise) to do so.

How much do our opinions of our own work change? How do we feel about rewriting it?

[Quincy Lehr]

I'll get back to you in about fifteen years, Max. The first book is still in its first printing, and while I think I'm way better at this now, well, it kind of remains to be seen what the longer view is.

[Henrietta kelly]

What’s wrong with rewriting others poems? It’s good for the brain.
Mankind evolved doing just that and I hope we continue until we get everything perfect – say 30 billion years

~~ henie

[Holly Martins]

If the writing a poem can be split into three basic tasks: 1) thinking up the idea. 2) making the first draft. 3) revising; then in terms of enjoyment and satisfaction I like 3, best followed by 1. and trailing a long way behind, 2. There is no greater satisfaction IMO than rescuing some poor bedraggled duckling and trying to turn it into a swan. Porter's idea that you are somehow letting your younger self down by revising old work is absurd.

[Mark Allinson]

Not a popular thread it seems.

Well, here is my self-evaluation - to date, that is.

I wrote my first poems and short-stories at 6, and I have been fiddling away at them ever since.

I had a few sporadic bursts of writing over the years, during holiday periods, etc, but nothing even close to being worth publishing.

It wasn't until I was involuntarily retired, about 6-7 years back, that I really got stuck into writing. Now, at 61, I have a handful of poems that quite possibly aspire to the upper reaches of the mediocre, and I am quite sure that some of them will last for many months after my death.

At the moment, and for about six months now, I have written almost nothing. No ideas, no rhythms, no inspiration.

But the weird thing is, I still feel (don't we all) that my best stuff is ahead. Maybe by 70 I will have something to say.

Maybe not.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Max, this is an interesting thread-topic you have started. The wording elicits subjective responses of the type "Sit down, and let me talk about myself", so…

For me, the rewriting of a "finished" poem is generally not an option. I might attempt another poem from my present vantage point, but I've acquired more baggage along the way and jettisoned a few assumptions. I might today, privately and pretentiously, call some of it wisdom, but in another decade (if my brain still works) my ideas of wisdom will likely have subtly changed again. Paradoxically, I do not readily discern any paradigm shift of the basics—the contours of my young uninformed ideals are mader smoother by many mistakes, but they remain.

I think, generally speaking, I could not "rewrite" an early text, because it documents the person I was at the time of its inception. To use a cliche: Everything flows, nothing stands still.

I have kept a few early things for sentimental reasons, my first "real" poem from high school years, some of the texts I had published in long defunct mags before I left the states decades ago. None of them are texts that I would want republished today, but I can see in them the poet I was striving to be. Just as I can see that long-ago poet reflected in many of the young writers who put up their work in adjacent threads.

Otherwise, I am glad to have purged a lot of ghastly texts and I keep a supply of clean paper to try to document today.

That said, I have during this past year of sporadic attempts to "seek and destroy", found old unsatisfactory pieces and realized how a little pruning or change of words could complete them. So I'm glad to have kept them. And there are a few remembered poems, zapped long ago, that I wish I had retained. But that's spilt milk and not worth a tear.

I hope others will weigh in on this. It is an interesting topic.

[Jerry Glenn Hartwig]

I look back to postings I made when I joined this forum and think, " I can't believe I wrote that crap."

I fully expect, in five years (assuming I keep writing and learning) that I will look back at what I'm writing today and grandly proclaim:

I can't believe I wrote that crap.



[This message has been edited by Jerry Glenn Hartwig (edited August 30, 2008).]

[Shaun J. Russell]

I'm constantly revising my work. I keep something of a "master document" that has most of my recent poems in it, and I'll often scroll through it if I'm thinking about making a poetry submission somewhere etc. Usually I'll get that flash of "first impression" when I re-read various poems, and will make changes -- sometimes big, sometimes cosmetic. In other words, I rarely think a poem of mine is completely finished, and I have no problem whatsoever with making changes to older work. On the other hand, I've also been known to recycle lines that date back to my juvenilia from fifteen years or so ago; in one instance, a line from a largely forgettable piece I wrote when I was sixteen wound up as the final line of a sonnet a couple years ago and was published earlier this year. So I suppose it can go both ways.

One thing I NEVER do is destroy old work. I have a large shoe box full of scraps of paper with lines of verse and originals of old poems, dating back to my mid-teens. Most of it is forgettable dreck, but it's formative dreck. I suppose it's simply nostalgia that prompts me to keep it. Likewise, I still have copies of similarly wretched, juvenile works on my hard drive, dating back to the earliest versions of Microsoft Word. I guess there's something to be said for posterity.