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I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Saturday, September 10, 2022

More revisions

If think of revising as "polishing," then are you thinking the poem as a shiny metal object or a pair of shoes? What if you chose another metaphor, like "weathering," exposing the poem to the elements to make it look a bit weather beaten? My point is that we have a choice of how to think of it. You are not stuck with one metaphor, "polishing."

I don't revise much, and a friend said yeah, but that's because you write those Frank O'Hara type poems. Thanks a lot, friend. I realized that you can't make a fetish out of not revising. The way you originally thought to phrase something might be quirky, and you might like that quality of quirkiness, so you keep that phrasing. Or not. You could just write the poem down from memory again and there would be changes. "I know I said I don't revise much but it is also true: / nothing remains the same." 

I am working on poems that just change shape as I add more things to them. I could sit down and write, repeating things (imperfectly) from memory from previous versions. Long poems would seem to work from accretion. Material is added, but also some layers of sediment are compacted or eroded, though a "weathering" process.   

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