The Demon of Poetry Revision

Every now and then, and frequently in my case, a poet comes to the point where he and his poem are standing in the middle of dusty main street, looking squinty-eyed into each other's faces as a tumbleweed blows by in the background. As you can gather, being the perceptive type, that time is very much like thepresent.

I am in a poetry class, and part of that poetry class is the regular requirement to write poetry. Writing it isn't bad; I am all for writing poetry. The drawback is that, once the poem is written, I have to show it to people (and not the people of my choosing) for their feedback. Now, I have a real problem showing things before they're done, and this insight became the reason I sat down today with the germ of a blog entry in my head: before I show a poem to someone, it is mutable, elastic, in a transitory state from present to perfect. I can change whatever. But once I have shown someone, it becomes sedentary, the consistency of old honey, because I have put my name on it. I have presented it by saying, "This is my poem. These are my words." And in that moment, something shifts from "How can I improve this?" to "How can I justify this to myself?" I tell myself that the poem has to be good enough now, regardless of its actual quality, because to admit otherwise is to admit that it wasn't good enough then, when someone else read it and heard its imperfection.

Ideally, I could take a poetry class in two parts. The first semester would be just writing the poems. The second semester, with a summer or so between the two for cooling down, would be about revising those poems. That would give me the time to sit and chew the poems I've written for a few months before anyone else has to see them, so I have a chance to make them as good as they can be. Otherwise, what's the use of receiving advice when I know it's something I myself will change soon?

But then again, perhaps all that time would just make me like every word, every comma all the more, and I would be all the more resistant to change when the time comes.

Maybe I should just move to a cabin with a sheepdog named Roger and keep all my poems in a big iron-bound chest, only to be found years after my death.

If you have a cabin and/or a sheepdog that looks like a Roger, look me up.