Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

How many times have I tinkered with a poem before realising that I’ve overcooked it, so then had to undo the change? It’s a good job I’m not a builder. Sure, no one wants to read the obvious word every time, but poets can of course overdo the tweaking by replacing the early-draft choices with alternatives whose other connotations are so far from being synonymous that they blur the original meaning and/or unbalance the syntax to an unbearable degree.

In his Paris Review interview with Frederick Seidel, Robert Lowell said this:

You think three times before you put a word down, and ten times about taking it out. And that’s related to boldness; if you put words down, they must do something, you’re not going to put clichés.

And this:

Almost the whole problem of writing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel, and that takes an awful lot of maneuvring.

By that, I infer that he means how the emotional kernel of the poem is conveyed and encased by the rest of it. The best advice I ever received from another poet was to ensure that every poem, like the Tin Man, had a heart.

When Seidel asked him if he revised a great deal, Lowell’s answer was emphatic: ‘Endlessly.’

Time is the poet’s greatest ally in revision: each and every poem needs to be set aside for a long enough period before the poet comes back to it and decides whether or not it needs more work. If there is a niggle at the back of your mind that some aspect of the poem isn’t quite right, then you can bet that an editor would spot it straight away, so that niggle can’t just be ignored before the poem is released into the wild.

But I’m as guilty as anyone of having, many times, sent off in a bout of unfounded enthusiasm a recently- or even just-written poem which hasn’t been allowed to settle into its best form. Wherever you are, I expect you could hear my sighing earlier today while I spent three hours rejigging a poem, which, thinking it was well and truly finished, I submitted to a journal only last week.

All of which begs the question as to when a poem is actually finished, if at all. In my case, it certainly wouldn’t, by any means, be finished if it were published in a journal or in a pamphlet, although I would do my level best to try and resist tinkering with it before including it in a full collection. Even then, perhaps only the reader can complete it, though that cliché sounds as trite as any other cliché.