I was fascinated to see a post from one of my Facebook friends, Jim Andrews, linking to a piece in the Boston Globe about how the practice of extensive revision of oneâs writing is a 20th Century and largely Modernist development. Craig Fehrman is the author of said article and his prime source is Hannah Sullivan. Hereâs a sample:
Itâs easy to assume that historyâs greatest authors have been historyâs greatest revisers. But that wasnât always how it worked. Until about a century ago, according to various biographers and critics, literature proceeded through handwritten manuscripts that underwent mostly small-scale revisions. Then something changed. In a new book, âThe Work of Revision,â Hannah Sullivan, an English professor at Oxford University, argues that revision as we now understand itâwhere authors, before they publish anything, will spend weeks tearing it down and putting it back together againâis a creation of the 20th century. It was only under Modernist luminaries like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf that the practice came to seem truly essential to creating good literature. Those authors, Sullivan writes, were the first who ârevised overtly, passionately, and at many points in the lifespan of their textsâŠâ SullivanâŠ, who belongs to a new wave of scholars trying to understand literature through the physical and historical realities of its creation, finds that our value of revision was also driven by something else: the typewriter⊠âThe Work of Revisionâ makes a case that what we write often comes down to how we write. Careful revision isnât automatic or even automatically useful. And that means, as our technology changes once again, that literary style may already be undergoing another transformationâŠ
With this in mind, I want to re-state some points I believe to be salient about the notion that extensive revision is a sign of failure in the writing process and perhaps add some new understanding regarding the âminority viewâ of how to get it right (or even mostly right) in the 1st sitting. This is not an exhaustive list, but a few favorites that have been of use to me in developing an organic approach to writing poetry. I will say that I am firmly in the camp of the Organic, which is the description that Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan used for their poetics in their early 60s correspondence.
A timeline:
1886: Founding of Smith Premier Typewriting Company (which would become Smith Corona). The first typewriter was created in a gun factory in Syracuse, New York because, according to Wikipedia: âThe parts of a typewriter are surprisingly similar to those of a shotgun âso producing the typewriter at the gun factory was logical and easy.â Their legacy in Seattle, besides typewriters, is the Smith Tower, with elevators still operated manually.
1912 â The birth of Modernism. Ezra Pound has the experience in Paris that would lead to the 1913 publication in Poetry magazine of: âIn a Station of the Metro.â Imagism, a huge component of modernism in poetry, was created by this moment.
1922 â Duino Elegies (Rainier Maria Rilke). Started ten years earlier, once World War I was over (& with it Rilkeâs depression over it) he was able to finish off his most famous work writing quickly in a pace he described in a 1922 letter as a âboundless storm, a hurricane of the spirit.â
1923 â Spring and All. William Carlos Williams bucks the going trend in Modernism with (ironically) the release of this Modernist classic. Note passages like: âTo perfect the ability to record at the moment when the consciousness is enlarged by the sympathies and the unity of understanding which the imagination gives, to practice skill in recording the force moving, then to know it, the largeness of its proportionsâ (48). Williams would develop a process that had a lot in common with the organic, publish a huge hunk of Projective Verse in his autobiography and write the introduction to AGâs Howl.
1925 â Yeats: A Vision. Poems dictated by spirits. A pre-cursor to Jack Spicerâs notion of âdictation.â
1950 â Projective Verse. Charles Olson, oft credited for being the first to use the term Post-Modern to describe literature, (see this) gets more to the core of writing in such a way as to avoid re-writing. From the essay: âONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION⊠keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizenâŠâ(240). Also of note is Olsons suggestion that a poetics is linked to a cosmology: âwhat stance toward reality brings such verse into being, what that stance does, both to the poet and to his readerâ (239). That, according to Olson, this act is about listening suggests the inability to listen or concentrate is at the core of the failed writing experience, resulting in the need to revise extensively. Olson also was clear in the essay that the typewriter was a tool to provide exactness in reproducing the poem aurally, likening the poem on the page to a musical score.
1963 â Letters of Duncan and Levertov. Itâs in a May 1963 letter to Denise Levertov that Robert Duncan describes the differences between a Conventional poet (a formalist), a Free Verse poet (he cites Ginsbergâs Howl as such a poem) and the Organic poet. He would be speaking of the poetry he and Levertov were writing and suggested that underlying the motivation of the Organic poet was the understanding that: âthe universe and man are members of a form. Our freedom lies in our apprehension of this underlying formâ (405). The correspondence of these two literary giants is a wealth of information about prevision, or the act of getting it right the first time. Duncan would have a great deal more to say about prevision and his comment that he did not use language, but âcooperated with itâ is indicative of the stance of someone writing in this manner.
1965 â Some Notes on Organic Form (Levertov). The best essay on this stance toward poem-making since Projective Verse. In this essay Levertov expounds on Olson and Duncanâs concepts, saying: ââŠthere is a form in all things (and in our experience) which the poet can discover and revealâ (67). She goes on to give a partial definition of organic poetry saying it: ââŠmight be that it is a method of apperception⊠such poetry is exploratoryâ (68). Later that year (1965) in an interview conducted by Walter Sutton, she would elaborate on that notion of scrupulous listening that Olson said was essential to prevision. The question was What do you mean by the inner voice?
âWhat it means to me is that a poet, a verbal kind of person, is constantly talking to himself, inside of himself, constantly approximating and evaluating and trying  to grasp his experience in words. And the âsound,â inside his head, of that voice is not necessarily identical with his literal speaking voice, nor is his inner vocabulary identical with that which he uses in conversation. At their best sounds and words are song, not speech. The written poem is then a record of that inner songâ (92).
See also her notes âOn The Function of the Lineâ in 1979, which elaborate further on the topic, as well as her notion that if the poem needs extensive revision, it was not ready; did not incubate enough, which is likely the most accurate thing said on this topic.
1965 â Spicerâs Vancouver Lectures. This event has become legendary in outrider North American poetry circles, and beyond, no doubt. A key line was a direct response to Olson: âIt isnât simply the matter of being able to get a fast take. Itâs something else â but the fast take is a good sign that youâre hooked up with some source of power, some source of energyâ (274). And later he says that the effort to get it right in the first take is based in part on the ability to âclear the mind away from itselfâ (275).
1975 â The Practice of Outside, Robin Blaser. Blaser was ostensibly breaking down his friend Spicerâs poetics, but he goes beyond where Spicer did and gives us jewels into the notion of dictation.
âThere is here an experience of dictation, now open to all of us, beginning where the manhood leaves off â at the open end of what we are. This is, I think, a beloved that may begin in sexuality, but it will end in the world â a vocabulary for it, a task, and a chemical necessity. The dictation or emptying out allows the unknown, as it is experientially and technically present to what we know, to enter and use the words, where it has been all along â strangely. The dictation resides⊠in the heart. It is as if the old mythologies were right that said the mind resided in the heart because it is so tied to speech and breath. An opening of the mouth. It is also true that the heart will unwind off the spool. That is part of our openness and our invisibilityâ (310).
1985 â TISH/Bowering, Wah â The TISH magazine and subsequent movement of writers associated with the magin Vancouver was an early 60s phenomenon (the movie The Line Has Shattered gives a glimpse into the seminal event of that scene), it was in 1985 that George Bowering published Craft Slices a book of short essays, many of which give a glimpse into the prevision process that Bowering has come to master. Going back to the early days of TISH, Bowering quotes the 21 year old Fred Wah as saying: âHere is the poem as energy-preserving object. It must preserve the instants of the poetâs own dance with his environment â the melodies, rhythms and structures found in unique contact with environment and response. I make the case for consonants as beats and the vowels carrying that mellismatic colour â our language is that real that it does have tones â essentially collisions of soundâ (32)
Bowering elaborates in many places in the book. On that same page he cites Duncan as their source of their notion of âpoetry- writing as a task, not as an accomplishment, not finding our own voices, as the creative writing teachers had it, but serving an order other and larger than ourselves.â He later states about the that the best poets of contemporary Canada âare agreed that the poet must not fancy himself so much as to abrogate a power over language, language their elder and their better. Like children again, they know enough to be seen and not heard, to let language, which knows so much more than they do, speakâ (140). One other great Bowering quote on his stance toward poem making I have quoted often and is linked here.
1995 â Michael McClure Three Poems. In his Authorâs Preface to this book, McClure states: âTo write spontaneously does not mean to write carelessly or without thought and deep experience. In fact, there must be a vision and a poetics that are alive and conscious⊠The moment of writing is complex and at the same time it is natural and vigorous. I do not know of a more adventurous gesture than to write spontaneouslyâ (xv).
2002 â Eileen Myles. Interviewed in 2002, she compared her practice (with its similarity to The Practice of Outside) with the prevailing school of poetry. She said: âThe thing is I feel if youâre so busy constructing the present correctly, you never have time to get to the future. Whereas if youâre dropping things wildly because youâre in a rush to be here, then you often run ahead of yourself.â She believes the poem âbeats you down the streetâ when you are not necessarily aware of the meaning of everything you write, but learn to trust an intuition, perhaps based on sound or other factors, that the chosen words are correct, decisions which are often validated years after the poem is written; hence, the poem has the potential to be prophetic.
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2005 â Jose Kozerâs Anima. In the introduction to his 2011 book of poems translated into Engish, Stet, Kozer is quoted as saying that most of his poems are composed in about 45 minutes. In Anima, the most recent book of poems translated into English, Kozer states: âThese poems are not under the control of any poetic will, they do not know themselves, they proceed from a strong sense of unreality connected to that deep ignorance the author feels before all things â above all, things related to his futureâ (97). Near the end of a talk at St. Vincent College, Kozer states that he is no responsible for the content of his poems, as they âare dictated.â
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2012 â Nate Mackey and the Serial Poem. Mackey, who describes his own process as a âslow improvisationâ has been tracking the notion of prevision for decades. Like the Jazz musicians of the 50s and 60s who would try another take to get a tune right in a recording session and then leave sometimes several versions of a tune for archivists to find and release years later, Mackey occasionally will publish two different takes on a stanza (or stanzas) in his poetry. In an August 2012 interview published in Amerarcana: A Bird & Beckett Review, Mackey said:
âŠCertainly the idea of first, second, third, fourth takes applies, but again itâs back to what I said earlier, which is that it gives a sense or it accepts a sense of provisionality, that what you see on page sixty-two was not final, nor is what you see on page sixty-four final. These are two versions that are of something. There is so much that is the same in them that you can see that they are versions of
some same thing. The idea that they could be varied, maybe endlessly I think, is there, but it also should shed a certain light or a certain way of looking on the rest of the work, the surrounding work that isnât repeated in as obvious a form as that. That work too is not definitive in some kind of final way. It too is subject to further takes. In some ways, thatâs what serial work is, take after take after take.
Earlier in that same interview, Mackey illuminates his notion of the serial poem as one of the most open approaches to writing poetry when he was asked to explain that formâs appeal:
The fact that things remain open. Itâs an open form. The well- wrought urn aesthetic, where the poem is this discrete, self-contained accomplishment in which everything fits together and works together in this well-oiled, machine-like way, imposes a certain sense of closure on each poem that I find constricting and found constricting. I wanted there to be the possibility of things coming into the poem that were not necessarily resolved in that poem, that were not necessarily pursued to their fullest or most exhaustive sense in the poem. I wanted things to come into the poem that would have a life beyond that particular poem and that would become part of an exploration that Iâd be involved in in my writing. The appeal of the serial poem is that it allows that. Itâs not so much a matter of itâs there and itâs done, but that again and again, again and again, again and again, you come back to certain concerns, certain motifs, certain figures. In a sense, thereâs the freedom of not feeling that one has been definitive, that one has closed things up, that one has shut the door on further exploration.Â
In discussing this post as it evolved over the last couple of days, Sam Hamill was quick to point out that Walt Whitman revised extensively and he predated the typewriter, but one could state the first version of Leaves of Grass is the strongest.
In our era of instant publishing (to the web) and short attention spans (hence the appeal of Twitter) weâre beginning to see the ramifications the computer, the internet and texting are having on writing and poetry, but the jury will be out for a few decades. Yet one still gets the notion that these are radical changes in the way we write and even think, dwarfing the effect the typewriter may have had. That the speed has picked up quite radically, of our culture, of writing (in this age of instant publishing) the notion of getting it right the first time may never have been so important and the minds of many, not just the poets, are revealed for the flaws Pound warned about when he said âMore poets fail from lack of character than lack of talent.â It behooves us, as humans, to make our writing like Philip Whalenâs, a âmap or graph of the mind movingâ and be sure that something interesting and original is going on there.
P.S. Brenda Hillmanâs recently published EcoPoetics Minifesto: A Draft for Angie is relevant:
AâAt times a poem might enact qualities brought from Romantic poetry,
through Baudelaire, to modernism and beyondâfreedom of form, expressive-
ity, & contentâtaking these to a radical intensity, with uncertainty, com-
plexity, contradiction;
Bâsuch a poem employs knowledge from diverse disciplinesâincluding sci-
entific vocabularies, but it does not privilege only the human. Research in-
cludes rural & urban wilds as well as knowledge from all cultures; creative
forms bring together earth & spirit, rejecting no sources, including the per-
sonal;
Câits energies shuttle across binaries; realism/non-realism, rationality/irra-
tionality, refuting received authority;
Dâsuch a poem like an animal could graze or hunt in its time, exploring each
word, carrying symbolic rhythms, syntax & images directly between the
dream & the myth; the imagination does not reject the spirit world;
Eâthen a poem is its own action, performing practical miracles:
1. âthe miracle of language rootsâ âto return with lexical adventures
2. âthe miracle of perceptionâ âto honor the senses
3. âthe miracle of nameless feelingâ âto reflect the weight of the subjec-
tive, the contours of emotion
4. âthe miracle of the social worldâ âto enter into collective bargaining
with the political & the social
Fâ& though powerless to halt the destruction of bioregions, the poem can
be brought away from the computer. The poet can accompany acts of resist-
ance so the planet wonât die of the human.
(See also: https://www.thenation.com/article/angels-radios-rainer-maria-rilke#axzz2ajDaKtVIÂ by Ange Mlinko on a related topic.)Â
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Great article, Paul! And what a useful chronology to put out there. Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share it! đ
Thans Kim. Like you said, itâs one method. Anyone is free to take this and customize for their own use. Are you postcarding this year?
Thanks, Kim, for the Twitter mention of this. Iâd been meaning to read it when I had the time and now I have and yes, Paul, it is excellent look at process. Iâll be linking to it in my next blog post (which is about postcarding, as it happens).
Thanks Linda.
Paul: thanks for this. I find myself somewhere in the middle: a great believer in craft and yet also of the ancient notion of the poet as âtranslating from the divine,â what Ginsberg called the poetâs âvaticâ (prophetic) role. This was roundly ridiculed in academic circles during the 20th century and weâre still feeling the hangover of that. As a young poet I became obsessed with revising poems and destroyed many that way. With more experience I find I can get a poem ârightâ within 3 drafts at most. Not unlike a musician who, once he knows his scales, doesnât have to think about playing anymore.
Indeed, the musician analogy works. I see it as a continuum, with the organic being one pole and the New Formalism being the other. Iâm WAY to the left here as well. Thanks for checking in.