Ben Hurst makes some good, if somewhat elementary, points in today’s post on the practice of editing and revising poetry: Revision, or The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
Comparing poets to painters, Hurst writes:
Painters find a way to move across their ideas as these ideas move beneath them, shifting with their own changing inspiration combined with their constant precision.
Continuing my commentary on certain essays from Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry I turn to the next essay in the collection, “When the Search Succeeds” by editor and poet Richard Foerster.
Foerster observes, “Literary editing … is at best a balance between disinterested judgment and an indulgence of personal tastes”, and most satisfying when it enables him to share “personal enthusiasms with others through the printed page”.
As an example, he offers Jane Flanders’s Pushcart Prize winning poem, “The House That Fear Built: Warsaw, 1943″. Foester first encountered this poem read aloud by poet herself. Foerster remarks on its sound and sound effects, and reminding us of Pope’s argument that “The sound must seem an echo to the sense”, and adding, “I wanted to see this poem after I heard it.”
The “sense” of the poem is deepened by use of “double-edged words”, chosen with care by the poet. But more remarkable is how this poem literally repeats itself (with a variation in point of view) each stanza, building meaning to a whole by adding new lines. Foerster remarks on this “unfolding of meaning”, explaining how the poem moves “from a close-up to a panorama”–this is, I think, how many good poems are effective, focusing on a specific part to relate a larger whole, perhaps directly through the poem, or by moving the reader to understand the world differently.
I recently sent a friend a birthday copy of Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry, a collection of 16 essays by editors of literary magazines published in the late 80s and reprinted through 2001. Neither of us are literary editors; we are both fairly excited (and excitable) about poetry, and I at least fancy myself a writer of poems from time to time. This collection provides some fairly interesting insights into the business, but more importantly some clear ideas about what makes a poem “publishable”.
The essays each center on one or two poems by a single author published by the editor, with the editor’s explanation of why that poet was chosen, and what that choice reveals about their own particular process of selection and editing. I intend to summarize key points from each of these essays over the next little while, to both share the insights and maintain a record for my own benefit.
David St. John, poet and editor of The Antioch Review penned the essay “On Editing”, which features two poems by Jane Hirshfield “In that World, The Angels Wear Fins” and “In a Net of Blue and Gold”.
David includes the following reflections on the task of editing:
On the Hirshfield poems David reveals, “each time I returned…I learned something new about them, and about myself as well. … Like all the best poems, they yielded slowly, like blossoms unfolding.”
