Archive for July, 2009
War Poetry
Carol Ann Duffy, the recently appointed poet laureate of England (and a mighty fine choice), has commissioned war poems for our times. Here is the result, published in The Guardian.
I admire this. Enjoy!
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).