Revising, Never Done

 LitHub has this Ocean Vuong on Taking the Time You Need to Write that caught my eye for its title. I knew of Ocean Vuong as a poet, I am not a poet, and also ass having written other things on writing I thought pertinent. Still, what stuck with me was this:

It’s never done. If I had a chance now with every book I wrote, every page would be a little different. Commas would be moved, words. And I think that’s beautiful, actually. That’s a good thing. It reminds us that the artist and the mind and the poem still grow. The poem is like a tree, and the book is a photograph of the tree. You take a photograph of the tree, but the next day, the tree has new cells. The next year, it has new branches. We have to make peace with the fact that a book is actually just a photo album, and that the organic psychic life of the poem is already growing somewhere else, somewhere inside you. And we pin it down. Maybe that’s why Whitman wrote so many editions of Leaves of Grass. He was like, I’ve got to update it. If it’s up to me, I’d update it too. But the conditions of publication in the 21st century don’t make that possible; there are limitations of the material world.

So I just make peace with it. I say, Well, maybe I have to take another photo of this tree in another book. The best way to revise, after a while, is to make something new.

So, my continued piddling with "Colonel Tom" and "Best of Intentions" and "True Love ways." The last two are from 2014. I hear them different now. Maybe I know more about writing now. Whatever reason, I am now more inclined to revise and revise again. Would that I had come to know this was the way to do things 40 years ago.

Think about it.

sch 12/30/22