Paint It Today
The two poems, “I am glad I am not what I look like” and “We bathed in clothes” began as a single draft, written this past Monday in the Coffee Obsession in Woods Hole. Like many of my poems, they arise from how I respond to a specific place.
Unlike when I was young, I now frequently, and sometimes extensively, revise. Revising makes a poem feel more like a process. I sometimes can’t say I like one version of a poem better than another. I like the idea of process, though, selfishly, I don’t want it to keep me from remaining famous (and worshipped) well into the twenty-fifth century (to speak conservatively).
Needless to say, I wouldn’t like to revise if I thought I wasn’t improving a poem. Increasingly, however, the process of composing anticipates that of revision, so I often think of a draft as a set of notes for a poem. I also like the idea of selecting materials and objects that happen to be lying around and organizing them into a work of art.
In this instance, the stanzas and individual lines in the original draft would read like a shuffled version of the two present poems. I was attracted by a woman in the coffee shop and about half the lines I wrote were about her. The others were more miscellaneous. A couple of days later it struck me that I might place the lines about the woman together and see if they would work that way, and then see what, if anything, I could make out of the other lines.
While many lines in both poems describe my surroundings, usually with an attempt at faithfulness to appearances (almost always problematic, of course), there is another important factor woven within and between them. I was reading H.D.’s unfinished novel Paint It Today and had it with me at the time of writing. In the (autobiographical) novel, “Midget” is the character H.D. based on herself. Trying to imagine which eight-letter word the woman in the coffee shop had deleted, I found suggestions by flipping through the novel’s pages. There are less literal allusions to the novel in both poems. Both titles are quotes from its dialogue.
There is nothing marvelously new or unique about any of these procedures.
Unlike when I was young, I now frequently, and sometimes extensively, revise. Revising makes a poem feel more like a process. I sometimes can’t say I like one version of a poem better than another. I like the idea of process, though, selfishly, I don’t want it to keep me from remaining famous (and worshipped) well into the twenty-fifth century (to speak conservatively).
Needless to say, I wouldn’t like to revise if I thought I wasn’t improving a poem. Increasingly, however, the process of composing anticipates that of revision, so I often think of a draft as a set of notes for a poem. I also like the idea of selecting materials and objects that happen to be lying around and organizing them into a work of art.
In this instance, the stanzas and individual lines in the original draft would read like a shuffled version of the two present poems. I was attracted by a woman in the coffee shop and about half the lines I wrote were about her. The others were more miscellaneous. A couple of days later it struck me that I might place the lines about the woman together and see if they would work that way, and then see what, if anything, I could make out of the other lines.
While many lines in both poems describe my surroundings, usually with an attempt at faithfulness to appearances (almost always problematic, of course), there is another important factor woven within and between them. I was reading H.D.’s unfinished novel Paint It Today and had it with me at the time of writing. In the (autobiographical) novel, “Midget” is the character H.D. based on herself. Trying to imagine which eight-letter word the woman in the coffee shop had deleted, I found suggestions by flipping through the novel’s pages. There are less literal allusions to the novel in both poems. Both titles are quotes from its dialogue.
There is nothing marvelously new or unique about any of these procedures.
posted by Joel at 2:32 PM
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