Three Turtles
Brenda Schmidt has just commented about the three versions of my poem “The Turtle” on her blog . I never really thought anyone would notice, let alone think it would be a neat idea to compare them, so her words mean a lot.
(photo borrowed from Wikipedia)
And that makes me think of the revision process and how most famously W. B. Yeats continuously fiddled with his poems. One of my poems that has undergone even more extensive revisions than “Turtle” is “Cubist View of the Saint John River.” (And for those who don’t have a copy of Arc 54, where it first appeared, you can find it online here.) In the very first draft, even before publication in Arc, I remember really trying to get what it sounded like, as well as trying to reproduce the shapes of ice (I tried organizing the lines in vaguely triangular shapes).
Al Purdy said something along the lines once about how poems are never completed, only abandoned. But there is a cautionary note about revisions. In one of her letters home, Sylvia Plath claimed that “a poem is a rare little watch: alter the delicate juxtaposition of cogs, and it may not tick” (Letters Home 171).
Excellent! I look forward to comparing those, too. If it stops storming long enough. Love the Plath quote. It’s new to me.
My habit of comparing began after acquiring the Norton Anthology of English Literature for a course way back when. In the back is a chapter called “Poems in Process” where you can compare versions of, say, Wordsworth’s “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” and Yeat’s “Leda and the Swan”, etc. Seeing evidence of process encourages me.
Brenda Schmidt
26 Jul 09 at 4:14 pm
I remember being fascinated by that anthology section as well! I just recently came across another interesting story about Yeats’ process in a great book called The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach. Apparently Yeats was hitting a wall at one point and started free writing in paragraphs. When he’d hit some words he would add a few rhymes. The finished poems were remarkably similar, only with line breaks. I highly recommend the book, if you haven’t already come across it. (I think you could actually make a whole academic life’s work focusing only on Yeats’ revisions!)
Ian LeTournneau
26 Jul 09 at 9:25 pm
Cool. I’ll track down that book. I just pulled out The Yeats Reader, a book I haven’t given a great deal of attention to, hoping to find a chapter of earlier versions, but no such luck. As I was looking for it, I came across some books that got shelved unread and forgotten about. Good grief.
Brenda Schmidt
26 Jul 09 at 10:07 pm