friggin with ur work.

peter boyle is an excellent poet. he has a well-trained ear for the lyric, and does wonderful things with the form - new and exciting things. for that matter, i don't think i know anybody that thinks jorge luis borges is anything less than an excellent poet. so is their stance against excessive drafting something for me to worry about? *

u see, it generally takes me around 10 drafts for me to think that a poem is starting to head in the right direction. i'll mess around with a poem for weeks, chopping a word off here, changing "with" to "in" and then back again, adding something there - tho i'm more likely to delete something. i often feel like john nash played by big russ in a beautiful mind; crazily muttering to myself over what i see as a beautiful pattern, but other people might see as a terrifying mess. a less intelligent version of course lol. often, indeed, i'm a bit concerned if my drafting process ends at the 10th version. surely there's more work to do there?

well, maybe i SHOULD be worried then. if i have to frig around with things so much, perhaps it means that there's nothing good to frig around with to begin with, so i should just throw my hands up and walk away. a lot of major (and not so major) journals would seem to agree with me here.

yet i don't really buy this at all. one attitude towards writing (a Romantic one, i'd say) is one of allowing an organic form to burst out from inside u and blaze itself upon a waiting page. excessive revision, in this perspective, would kill this beautiful breathing thing. yet, this is a troubled view when inspected closely; one only need to look at wordsworth's manifesto in lyrical ballads to see that the distinction between nature and artifice is an immensely conflicted one.

perhaps my approach to composition is too mechanical - like i'm tinkering with a motor or, better yet, have a lego kit in front of me (the good old bricks, without those specialised bits which force u to make a fire engine and a fire engine only), and that i'm at liberty to take out bits or put in something until i get a bit bored. where's the inspiration? the magic?

for me, i don't think there's some perfect-formed poem nestled in my soul somewhere begging for an easy birth. i prefer to look at the words i have at hand, sound them out, fiddle with them to see if there are any weak bits, throw the whole thing away for a bit to have a meal or a wank, and get back to playing with it later. a kind of barthesian (i love how his (author's) name plays such an important role in that death essay) blender, grabbing words that are around me and seeing if anything good happens when they're mushed together.

i respect and love people that have some high plan of Poetry, some sort of making plain of the unconscious. beautiful stuff is written like that. yet the tinkerers among the poets make beautiful, bright things as well. intentionality is a perilous concept, and i often try to forget about it as much as i can when playing with poems. as paradoxical as it is, it's a way for me to get past blabbering about myself in too obvious a fashion. i really don't think i'm so interesting a person that i can be justified in holding some deliberate poetic construct of myself squarely in the audience's face.

then again, my last little river poem (see my 2nd post here), took only about 5 biggish revisions, and i think i'm going to leave it alone now. this is something very different for me: a poem that i haven't fucked with endlessly, but still think is done. i wonder if there will be many more like that?



* peter boyle said in an interview(printed on pg. 41 of illumina, an excellent little sydney journal published last year): "if I revise something ten times to try to make it work it nearly always means there was no sufficient impetus to write the poem to start with"