Anne Sexton once described a finished poem as "last year's cold."
We can take at least a couple of messages from this odd statement. One, writing is akin to sickness--fever, aches and pains, snot, coughing, boiling guts, depression--that must be suffered through, an ague that that returns each new effort and must be suffered again. And two, a finished poem is . . . finished. There's no going back to it. What "finished" means, of course, is a subjective thing, all in the writer's head but also a part of convention, for most of us consider our work "finished" when it has achieved what looks and feels like a poem.
Some poems, though, are not finished. We write drafts, give up, come back to them, give up again, slip them into a manila folder marked "DRAFTS," and file them away in a desk drawer. They aren't "done," but we are "done" with them. For the time being.
I'm not talking here about fragments, stray lines or images that we jot down throughout the day as these come to us unbidden and that we keep in a journal or on scraps of paper for later use (like the strips of proto-poems in Bennett's sewing basket). Nor do I mean those failed "exercises" that we save, hoping to mine them at some later writing of some other poem.
I mean those formalized efforts--the bidden--which we begin with every expectation of producing a full-fledged work of art sooner rather than later, but which resist us. The poem-in-progress whose basic form, message, tone, voicing we mean to preserve pretty much as we first imagined it, however inchoately. These are the poems we wrestle to a draw but believe we can still pin to the mat.
Maybe this is just stubbornness, or our neurotic inability to walk away from an investment. It sure feels that way to me about some of the poems I've kept filed away in a two-drawer metal cabinet for, in some cases, 40 years.
There is one poem, titled "October Abstract," that has nagged me since at least the early 1980s. I labored over it through maybe 50 drafts in the first months, each draft changing only cosmetically from the previous. I kept writing and then copying it, first in longhand, then on a typewriter, over and over, hoping, I guess, that one of those copies would be the poem I was after. How pathetic is that?! Eventually, I produced and saved so many nearly identical drafts that I entered the entire set into a book-art show, as a comment on the narcissism of art and creativity: all the drafts were crumpled up and tossed into a waste can with the title "October Abstract" taped to the outside. But the truly creepy thing was that after the book-art show was taken down, I smoothed out each crumpled draft as best I could and refiled the lot. This was in the early 1990s. They lurk today in that filing cabinet, calling me back to into the ring.
The poem mocks me. It's that cold that I never quite got over. Like a virus, it has been with me for most of my adult life, returning from time to time to my imaginative consciousness as a kind of flare-up.
That poem has stayed there unchanged all these years, even while I've changed, as a person, a writer, a poet. I haven't looked at it in seven or eight years now, but as a part of the project I'm about to propose, I'm going back into the ring with it. As always, I'll go back resolved to settle things once and for all with this piece. If I give myself the space to think about it, though, I'll have no confidence that anything will change: this poem is a living example of the business canard, insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. But I'm going to pull that thing out today and take another crack at it. Who knows, maybe this time . . . ?
---------
And so this project. Go to your files. Find a poem that you wrote so long ago that you're no longer the same person who wrote it. Like the story of Dorian's Picture, one of you has moved on, aged, while the other has remained unchanged. Pull that poem out and re-read it. Maybe you believed early on that it was "finished," and maybe upon re-reading it you still believe so. Or maybe you'll see something different. Bring the poem to our next session. We'll talk about who you were--or thought you were--when you wrote it.
This will be weird.
We can take at least a couple of messages from this odd statement. One, writing is akin to sickness--fever, aches and pains, snot, coughing, boiling guts, depression--that must be suffered through, an ague that that returns each new effort and must be suffered again. And two, a finished poem is . . . finished. There's no going back to it. What "finished" means, of course, is a subjective thing, all in the writer's head but also a part of convention, for most of us consider our work "finished" when it has achieved what looks and feels like a poem.
Some poems, though, are not finished. We write drafts, give up, come back to them, give up again, slip them into a manila folder marked "DRAFTS," and file them away in a desk drawer. They aren't "done," but we are "done" with them. For the time being.
I'm not talking here about fragments, stray lines or images that we jot down throughout the day as these come to us unbidden and that we keep in a journal or on scraps of paper for later use (like the strips of proto-poems in Bennett's sewing basket). Nor do I mean those failed "exercises" that we save, hoping to mine them at some later writing of some other poem.
I mean those formalized efforts--the bidden--which we begin with every expectation of producing a full-fledged work of art sooner rather than later, but which resist us. The poem-in-progress whose basic form, message, tone, voicing we mean to preserve pretty much as we first imagined it, however inchoately. These are the poems we wrestle to a draw but believe we can still pin to the mat.
Maybe this is just stubbornness, or our neurotic inability to walk away from an investment. It sure feels that way to me about some of the poems I've kept filed away in a two-drawer metal cabinet for, in some cases, 40 years.
There is one poem, titled "October Abstract," that has nagged me since at least the early 1980s. I labored over it through maybe 50 drafts in the first months, each draft changing only cosmetically from the previous. I kept writing and then copying it, first in longhand, then on a typewriter, over and over, hoping, I guess, that one of those copies would be the poem I was after. How pathetic is that?! Eventually, I produced and saved so many nearly identical drafts that I entered the entire set into a book-art show, as a comment on the narcissism of art and creativity: all the drafts were crumpled up and tossed into a waste can with the title "October Abstract" taped to the outside. But the truly creepy thing was that after the book-art show was taken down, I smoothed out each crumpled draft as best I could and refiled the lot. This was in the early 1990s. They lurk today in that filing cabinet, calling me back to into the ring.
The poem mocks me. It's that cold that I never quite got over. Like a virus, it has been with me for most of my adult life, returning from time to time to my imaginative consciousness as a kind of flare-up.
That poem has stayed there unchanged all these years, even while I've changed, as a person, a writer, a poet. I haven't looked at it in seven or eight years now, but as a part of the project I'm about to propose, I'm going back into the ring with it. As always, I'll go back resolved to settle things once and for all with this piece. If I give myself the space to think about it, though, I'll have no confidence that anything will change: this poem is a living example of the business canard, insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. But I'm going to pull that thing out today and take another crack at it. Who knows, maybe this time . . . ?
---------
And so this project. Go to your files. Find a poem that you wrote so long ago that you're no longer the same person who wrote it. Like the story of Dorian's Picture, one of you has moved on, aged, while the other has remained unchanged. Pull that poem out and re-read it. Maybe you believed early on that it was "finished," and maybe upon re-reading it you still believe so. Or maybe you'll see something different. Bring the poem to our next session. We'll talk about who you were--or thought you were--when you wrote it.
This will be weird.
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