[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

Others have probably expressed my take adequately enough, but here's mine FWIW.

Bill asks: "When does the extreme revisionist become bad for himself?"

Well, if it's compulsive, then it could be a problem, but otherwise, unless it means neglecting other important areas of his life, I would say "Never". Breathing new life into old pieces is, after all, what writing poetry is all about.

I'm a revisionist myself, and although I do occasionally feel like I'm hacking at a stone that should be left, I soon get over that. Often I see it as a good way of warming up when I want to write new stuff and don't have a clue what that new stuff will be. Sometimes I'm probably kidding myself, but hey, then I do sometimes actually succeed in improving some old stuff.

Whitman revised Leaves of Grass throughout his life, and comparing the first and final versions is interesting. I think both versions are good. The later one is more or less a slightly expanded version of the earlier one. Basically he added some afterthoughts, which seems fair enough to me.

George Mackay Brown has been criticised for leaving out some of his more "risqué" pieces (and believe me, they're hardly risqué) in his later selections of his work, but I think that is unjustified. Should he have to have his work pinned to him as a constant reminder of what he once wrote, or should he not rather have been allowed to dissociate himself from work which he no longer felt was representative of the writer he had become?

What it boils down to for me, I think, is that I choose to update some of my pieces so that when/if I recite them tomorrow, they will represent me where I am today in relation to those pieces, rather than where I was yesterday in relation to them. The new versions don't mean the old ones were inadequate.

Having said this, I will admit that I do like to think that when I change something then I'm improving it. It must be a kind of suspension of disbelief.

Duncan

PS The piece I've got on the current issue of The Flea was one I wrote 18 years ago. Seven years ago my cousin said I should add a final verse so that it ends on an upbeat. This January I did.