On Poetry

[Angeline]

Ironically, I had forgotten I had read this Arthur Sze’s poem Snow. It had melted away with me from memory. Then there it was again, how like snow. That last line, crystalline, the entire poem ethereal reappears in my mind. Inspiring as a spring in her shroud.

It's a lovely poem, isn't it? He creates the sense of snow...the way it stills and obliterates one's world...and then with that final image melts it away. And he only uses the word snow once and only one direct image about it. Brilliant.

We had a big snowstorm in my neck of the woods last night into this morning so I'm really feeling this poem today lol.

 

[Angeline]

Renee Nicole Good, the mother of three who was murdered by an ICE agent in Minneapolis yesterday, was a USA citizen with no criminal record. She was also an award-winning poet.

Rest in power, Sister Renee. May your memory be a blessing. May you not be forgotten.

 

[SapioSexual9]

Rest in power, Sister Renee. May your memory be a blessing. May you not be forgotten.

 

[Angeline]

How We Disappear *

I am in the store touching things.
Linen napkins, a blue bowl.
The world is on fire and I am choosing
between two kinds of soap.

Everyone here is doing this, filling carts
with small comforts where somewhere a child
goes to bed hungry, while the earth heats,
while men make decisions about who gets to live.

I know what this is, this careful arranging
while everything collapses.
This is how we survive.
And also how we disappear.

*by Alessandra Olenow

 

[42BelowsBack]

How We Disappear *

I am in the store touching things.
Linen napkins, a blue bowl.
The world is on fire and I am choosing
between two kinds of soap.

Everyone here is doing this, filling carts
with small comforts where somewhere a child
goes to bed hungry, while the earth heats,
while men make decisions about who gets to live.

I know what this is, this careful arranging
while everything collapses.
This is how we survive.
And also how we disappear.

*by Alessandra Olenow

I have been feeling exactly like this. Rearranging my thoughts.

 

[Tzara]

If you take a college-level class in poetry writing (or any kind of creative writing, actually), you'll probably get told that revising your work is of particular importance. In some of the writing seminars I was in, you'd have to submit as many, or even more, revisions of older poems as new ones—including revisions of revisions of revisions.... You would get introduced to all kinds of revision practices up to and including throwing the original poem out and completely rewriting it. You'd be given examples of poets who were obsessive about revising their poetry (Donald Hall sticks in my mind as claiming he'd revise poems something like 100 times before publishing them).

In January of this year, Angie started a Revise-a-Poem challenge that, after an initial flurry of posts, pretty much died. This may be due to most of us not being interested in polishing our work for publication (i.e. publication in journals, not on Lit) or just an attitude like "I've dumped my feelings on the page and don't care to revisit them." While I sometimes think about revising some of my poems, I rarely get around to it, probably for the latter reason above.

The reason I'm bringing this up is because of a poem I ran across today while reading a collection by Ellen Bass. I particularly liked her poem "The Kitchen Counter" and was going to link it to the "POETRY. LINKED READINGS ONLY THREAD". Here's the poem as it appears in Bass's 2020 collection Indigo:

The Kitchen Counter

Today I heard a young woman read a poem
in which her husband lifts her bare bottom
onto the kitchen counter
and, in the next line, spreads her legs.

The marriage has problems. They may already be divorced.
But suddenly I am ruing the fact
that no one has lifted my bottom to a kitchen counter.

Not when my bottom trotted high and proud.
And not when it began to eye the floor
as if contemplating its future.

And now, I'm going to die
without ever being taken on those cold hard tiles.
Don't tell me it's not too late. It is.
​

But when I went searching for the poem on the web, all I found was a much longer poem, which I won't link here because it isn't correctly formatted. The poem originally appeared in American Poety Review in 2017 and looked like this:

The Kitchen Counter

Today my student read a poem in which her husband lifts
her bare bottom onto the kitchen counter
and, in the next line, spreads her legs.

The marriage has problems. They may already be divorced.
But suddenly I am ruing the fact
that no one has lifted my bottom to a kitchen counter.

Not when my bottom trotted high and proud.
And not when it began to eye the floor
as if contemplating its future.

And now, I'm going to die
without ever being taken on those cold hard tiles.
Don't tell me it's not too late. It is.

My mother - when the old women in her condominium
wished for the past -
would snap at them, "You had your turn."

And I had mine.
Making love on a beach in a glut of sunlight.
And silvered by the moon in a rhododendron forest.

Jiggling on waterbeds, slicked in showers,
and, oh bliss, one night in Mombasa, sheets smoked
with incense and jasmine pinned into my hair.

With all the suffering in the world
and all my own mistakes, you'd think
there'd be no room for such a slight lament.

But I worry, as I skid ever closer
to the end, that it will be more
and more like this - regrets

and hungers I never knew I had
sneaking out
from all the tight pleats of my life.
​

I find a couple things interesting about the differences between the versions. First of all are the changes to the first strophe: In the revised version (the first one above), there are four lines instead of the three that all the other strophes consist of (in either version), "my student" becomes the more generic "a young woman," and the end words/breaks are different (partly because of the increased number of lines). For me, all of these changes are fairly typical of the kinds of things one might do when revising a poem. The change from "my student" to "a young woman" perhaps makes the image that follows more iconic or universal, rather than being the specific experience of Bass's student. The change in breaks allow Bass to highlight the word "bottom" over "counter" as the poem (actually, I think, both poems) are more about the poet's concerns about the sexuality of her body than the particular act of countertop sex, as well as avoiding "counter" as an end word in both of the first two strophes.

The really interesting revision, though, is that Bass simply lops off the last six strophes of the poem. Why?

I think she felt that her initial subject (her aging sexuality) gets lost or at least diluted in the latter part of the poem, which is more about reminiscence that the first part. The last strophes make the poem thematically different from what she apparently wanted it to be about. So, despite some very fine lines and imagery (I especially like the last lines, "regrets // and hungers I never knew I had / sneaking out / from all the tight pleats of my life" I think her changes, radical as they are, strengthen the poem.

 

[Angeline]

What a great post, Tzara! I do have residual guilt about the failure of the Revise-A-Poem thread, like if I'd tried harder the thread might have succeeded. Otoh I didn't want to dominate the thread or suggest my revision processes are the "right" way to do it. And I agree that, for a variety of reasons, people here ain't into revising their poems...at least not here, for all to see.

Imo that's a loss because if you do revise what you write maybe I and others could learn from the way you do it. A lot of poets here also write stories and I bet they revise them, even if that just entails getting help from an editor. I know I could benefit from understanding others' revision processes. Oh well.

The Ellen Bass poems are great (and good sleuthing on your part, T). I like both and agree the 2020 iteration is the better one for the theme of aging sexuality and the regret she associates with it. The earlier version, while good and an interesting read is kind of all over the place. "I was here and there, did this and that, here's what my mom said, etc." Her changes, especially the cuts, made a stronger, more focused poem. Still there are some great lines that she cut. I hope they're recycled, especially that "tight pleats" bit.

 

[Tzara]

The Ellen Bass poems are great (and good sleuthing on your part, T). I like both and agree the 2020 iteration is the better one for the theme of aging sexuality and the regret she associates with it. The earlier version, while good and an interesting read is kind of all over the place. "I was here and there, did this and that, here's what my mom said, etc." Her changes, especially the cuts, made a stronger, more focused poem. Still there are some great lines that she cut. I hope they're recycled, especially that "tight pleats" bit.

Bass's poem is, I think, unusual in how much of the original was discarded in the rewrite, but it is by no means the most severe pruning of a poem in revision that I've ever seen. That honor goes to Marianne Moore's famous surgery on her poem "Poetry," which went through a number of revisions in its printing history, the best known of these being the contrast between the original version, published in Others: A Magazine of the New Verse in 1919 and the (much shorter) version published in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967), where the original appears in the end notes labeled, tersely but appropriately, as "original version."

The contrast between the two is startling and it is generally thought to exemplify how awfully a poem can be damaged in revision. Robert Pinsky, in a brief article about the poem's revision, states that "[m]any readers, including numbers of Moore’s fellow poets, consider this one of the most egregious examples ever of terrible revision." It is certainly one of the most radical revisions of a poem ever produced by a famous poet.

Here is the 1919 version:

Poetry

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.

Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise

if it must, these things are important not because a​

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are

useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we

do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,

holding on upside down or in quest of something to​

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under

a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—
ball fan, the statistician—case after case

could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid

to discriminate against “business documents and​

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction

however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be

“literalists of
the imagination”—above

insolence and triviality and can present​

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have

it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
the raw material of poetry in

all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,

genuine, then you are interested in poetry.​

The 1967 version is cut so severely as to almost fade into nothingness:

Poetry

I, too, dislike it.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.​

For me, other than the lineation which seems almost pointless, the latter version is more of a statement of belief rather than a poem. It seems better suited for a slogan in a political manifesto than as a poem. All of the imagery from the original is stripped out and even Moore's characteristic syllabic meter is effectively missing, as there are no lines duplicating the meter in successive strophes.

It does, however, certainly change the reader's experience and perhaps that was Moore's intent—to focus completely on the theme that poems, whatever one thinks about them aesthetically, can offer a reader the experience of "the genuine."

Like most readers, though, I vastly prefer the original.