[Bill Dyes]

Catherine:

Cattherine, I once was asked if it was OK to remove a posting here because no connection could be seen between the change and the original. I bent to the individual's judgment because to tell you the truth I was a little embarressed. I have since revised it at least 4 more times. I have a number of poems over 10 years old that have been revised to something almost unrecognizable, even to me, since I wasn't faithfully keeping each revision. In fact, my brother put one to music and when I showed him the revision he said, "Well, I'm not writing another song". if you were posting a revision that was a few year's apart from the last revision would you post the two most recent versions at once. I suppose that would be the fair thing to do. I think in Robert Lowelll's "Collected" there is a rather large section of his revisions.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Bill, you have written a number of poems which I remember very well. I also remember some of them coming back in new revisions. Let me say right now that I have always recognized a lot of very fine writing in your poems.

I used to think I was writing the same poem over and over again, i.e. the "subject material". I finally figured out that this was not a bad thing, just as a visual artist can return again and again to a subject in endless varitions, so can a poet.

This is what I would like to see you do. Keep the poem but move to another poem with the same subject. I remember the poem about raking leaves, the father bleeding (is that the library poem?), another that I liked a lot is the one about the room, the table, the walls, the window. Excuse me if I am not explaining them well, but you will know the ones I mean. If I think hard, I can come up with other poems by you I have seen here. I have always been sorry that you appear so sporadically and I am glad to see you posting again.

To thine own self be true--keep the poem and move the subject to the next framework. You have done some fine work which disappears in the next revision.

Does that make sense?

[Bill Dyes]

Hello Janice;

I still make an attempt you read you here whenever I can. I am an uncreditialed, largely untrained, even uneducated writer of poetry. I suppose constant revision is an attempt to make-up for that. I do read as much poetry as I can. My wife even gets frustrated whenever I show her something. She says, why don't you write something new. I will probably never be a regular poster here because I really don't write consistently or even revise consistently. But it is good to hear that lots of revsising isn't necessarily a symptom of anything I should be overly concerned about. Thanks.

[Jean L. Kreiling]

Hi, Bill--

I always thought that thorough and repeated revising was in fact a "symptom" of conscientious, serious writing, not a bad sign at all! That could be wishful thinking, since I am an "extreme" reviser!

Someone wiser than I will know the quotation I'm thinking of--something about never actually finishing a poem, but finally having to "abandon" it???

Best,
Jean

[David Rosenthal]

I constantly revise old stuff, even as I continue to write new stuff. I honestly don't think there is one of my already published poems that I haven't revised since its publication. Sometimes it starts as a procrastination ploy because revising seems easier than creating a new draft, but after a while it really is just as much of a pain.

David R.

[Maryann Corbett]

Originally Posted by Jean L. Kreiling

Someone wiser than I will know the quotation I'm thinking of--something about never actually finishing a poem, but finally having to "abandon" it???

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned." Paul Valery.

No wisdom needed, Jean! Only good search skills.

[Jean L. Kreiling]

Thanks, Maryann--I thought of googling, but was either too unsure I was even close to the quotation, or too lazy, or both!

[Janice D. Soderling]

Just to clarify.

Revision is good. I revise A LOT.

I am not suggesting that one should not revise. What I want to say is that you (me, anyone) needs to know when to stop revising.

Compare it to painting. Sometimes one needs to say this landscape, (portrait, whatever) is finished and move to the next canvas. If you just keep painting one picture on top of another, you will only have one painting.

[Shaun J. Russell]

Add me to the list of people who have no problem revising their work, regardless of how old it is. I used to think that I would cease revising poems that have been published, but I've already made changes to at least one of those, or possibly two.

As most folks here know, I love Auden dearly, but I can't agree with the notion that revisions shouldn't happen once a poem has existed for a few years. Sometimes you just think of a better way to describe something, or you've found a way to tighen up the meter, or perhaps your opinion on punctuation has changed somewhat -- maybe those double-hyphens you were once so fond of look a bit clunky now!

In short, there's no reason for limitations on such things, in my opinion.

[Will Gourley]

Bill, Elizabeth Bishop revised "One Art" about 40 times I think. It is instructive to follow her course of bad, to good, to OK, to worse, to better, to, at last, the masterpiece.

Then there is the perseverance of the sly compulsive (Oscar Wilde, I think), who said he would spend an entire morning putting commas in sentences, and the entire afternoon taking them out. Same thing the next day. Try it; it’s fun, for a while.

The alternative to revision is to publish, perish the whole work, or Oscar Wilde the days. Battle them all.

Cheers wkg
'Tis a gift to grow, 'tis a gift to commit