Today I’m celebrating the one year anniversary of this website and reflecting on my goals for it and my poetry. While writing was always my first ambition, my secret desire, I was initially trained as a musician: my undergraduate degree is in performance. The correlation between the two practices has always been obvious to me, the painstaking hours spent alone in a small room first warming up then running over and over the same passages, the listening(reading) to others, the disproportionate rewards for time spent, the sheer joy of performance.

The difference for me was that I didn’t enjoy the practice time for music whereas I love editing. I would watch the clock while running over sections of a sonata but am regularly late for dinner while choosing and discarding words.

This website was designed to lay bare my editing process, because I’d always wanted to see how others edit but couldn’t find anything in print or on the web. Clearly, others are interested in the process too. According to my statistics program, I have over 300 regular readers who come back over 3 times a month to read these posts. Most of you live in Canada and the United States but others come from Germany, Spain, the UK, etc.

While reflecting my love of editing, this website also inadvertently reveals my perfectionism: my love of honing a line has made me aware of my ability to improve it, which becomes a fierce responsibility, which ends up as a kind of fear. If I know hard work can make a poem better, then I think I must keep working at it and I become afraid to let go, knowing I can always improve on what’s there, if I just read more, learn more, and then revise again.

Obviously I have periodically persuaded myself to part with some poems. That’s why I have the publication record I have, plus three more coming out in an upcoming Descant issue. But I am holding myself back. Friends have published several books of poetry while I sit writing and polishing.

And as for my novel, my third one (I’ve already rejected the previous two), it sits in permanent virtual reality on my hard drive, once again waiting for that final final final edit even though I keep promising myself I’ll send it out again.

I love editing, yet I need to learn how to let go. How to know when a work is done.

John Adams, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer, reminds me in his Juilliard Commencement Speech, ‘A life in the arts means loving complexity and ambiguity, of enjoying the fact that there are no single, absolute solutions.’

Much as I wish it were possible, there will never come a point when I feel I’ve reached perfection in a poem. I need to stop aiming for it. But not to stop aiming towards it.

Earlier in his speech, Adams reminded his audience of graduating performers – and us – that ‘The arts … are difficult. They are mind-bendingly and refreshingly difficult. You can’t learn the role of Hamlet (no less write it), you can’t play the fugue in the Hammerklavier Sonata (no less compose it) and you can’t hope to move effortlessly through one of Twyla Tharp’s ballets without submitting yourself to something that’s profoundly difficult, that demands sustained concentration and unyielding devotion.’

I’ve given poetry my devotion. Now I also need to learn how to let go. Which means, I also need to learn how to stop posting what are probably final versions rather than current versions of my poems on this website. It’s time I got a book manuscript off to a publisher.

So today, here’s a first draft:

uprooting the wild maple, the weed maple, a hundred
mini trees bunched in my hand, smelling
of the greenness of the earth, the white roots still
wriggling, the blind seeking earth’s black
blindness, the sucking that leads to
growth, the sun transposed cell by thirsty
cell, placing rings around a tiny
stem longing for the thickness only time
can bring, time and the abundance of
rain falling, snow’s thickness, the white blanket against
the bite of cold’s teeth on the young. All the grief in
one hand, all the cut-off life, all that will not
grow by my choice, the choices each day forces
hour by hour. I could turn, leave the hundreds
more, the jungle my garden wants
to be, let thirst thin the tiny twin leaves, choose only
sofa’s static safety, but those rings have
choked you already, a tightness of throat preventing
speech so you weed, hearing the hydrageanas’
voice sing as you do.

And a stage further along, where I’ve simply started working on it, at this point, only tidying the language, not yet looking at where it’s going. I’ve been playing with line endings, choosing verbs this time to drive the poem, which help to set an eerie atmosphere.

Next Stage:

uprooting the wild maple, the weed maple, a hundred
mini trees bunched in your hand, smelling
of green, the white roots wriggling, the blind seeking
earth’s black blindness, the sucking
that leads to growth, sun transposed cell by thirsty
cell to place rings around a tiny stem longing
for time’s thickness, time and the abundance of rain falling,
the snow white blanket against
the bite of cold’s teeth. All that grief in
one hand, all that cut-off
life that will not grow by your choice,
the constancy of choice a weight the tree won’t have to know. You could
repent, leave the jungle your tree wants to be, let thirst thin
the tiny twin leaves, choose only
sofa’s static comfort, but rings choke
you already, a throat tightness so
you weed, hearing the hydrangeas sing
as you do.

.
p.s. Many thanks to my composer/conductor friend Marg Stubington for sending me Adams’ speech.

p.p.s. I know Adams says “A life in the arts means a life of sacrifice and tens of thousands of hours of devotion and discipline with scant remuneration and sometimes even scant recognition” but couldn’t some of you 300+ leave comments more often?

I recently accompanied my husband to the American Association of Geographers’ Annual Meeting and snuck into a few fascinating sessions on, of all things, the geography of poetry. I wrote non-stop during those sessions as the geographers’ words sparked lines in my head.

It’s appropriate that I have sat down to edit some of them while attending the Canadian Association of Geographer’s Annual Meeting, which is being held in conjunction with the Canadian Cartographic Association. Inspiration is all around me at every table.

Today’s poem owes particular gratitude to Adele J. Haft, Professor of Classics at Hunter College of The City University of New York. The paper she presented at the AAG was called ‘”Like Maps Laid Face to Face”: Bodies as Maps from Aristophanes to Louise Bogan and Sharon Olds’. She introduced ‘fifteen twentieth-century poems and touche[d] upon their map-related themes and debts to cartographic literature, maps, and the history of exploration’ (from her abstract). It isn’t published yet but meanwhile, you can read her other articles on maps and poetry by checking out her CV.

Having talked about the inspiration for this poem, I have to confess that its first few lines didn’t come from the conference. They were scribbled late at night by flashlight:

Staying Up Late

postponing the wrapping of sleep’s caul, the rolling
of sleep’s tight rug, holding your eyes open against
the words your brain whispers in the night, the words you wake
to turn against, a shovel
digging, boot firm against the sharp lip while stars
take their light years to remember

To continue this poem, I turned to my files from Adele’s presentation. I immediately discarded the poem fragments I’d written then because they were irredeemably bad. But individual lines could be worked with. I chose the ones below:

having to walk the map as your body, the one you redrew over & over as a child

your body a map you can’t follow, stretching your legs like roads into a new city, one you can’t explore
your face a map showing the way things were, a topography that holds you back as you age,

mirror world you could enjoy, green tunnels leading you to a cool world

all our histories a stutter in time, a leaf’s shake

You have no myths

Having put the lines together, the poem first came out like this:

Studying Cartography

You stay up late
postponing the wrapping of sleep’s caul, the rolling
of sleep’s rug tight
around you, holding your eyes open against
the words your brain whispers in the night, the words you wake
to turn against, waking to turn and turn, a shovel
in the earth digging, boot firm against
the sharp edges while stars open
their blind eyes, taking light years to remember
your name. The hum
of the air conditioner perfumes the air, the green
curtain descending, your body falling, falling, as you walk
the map of your body, the one you redrew
as a child, your face showing the way things were, your legs
stretched, roads into a new city, one tourists knew
well. You remember the mirrors, green
tunnels leading you to a cool world, the glaciers
at opposing poles they once believed
would never melt, history a stutter, a leaf’s
shake, a foreign country that was always
on your to do list. But Icarus’ wings never
appealed. You were too smart
for melting wax. You knew the sun’s
raging heat from textbooks and so you sit,
the woman who threw her coat
on the floor and left.

This was scary. The poem had flowed so well under my hands, I was convinced I had a winner. But rereading it, it didn’t work. It’s too obvious, for starters, which is a standard weakness of mine. I think there probably is a rule against using the word ‘whispers’ in a poem. If there isn’t, there should be. It’s trite. Grossly overdone. (I convict myself here.) So I replaced it with ‘repeats’. After all, we’re all kept awake at night by lists of things undone, by worries and regrets we rehearse.

The poem has a lot of images in it, so I seriously considered removing the shovel image (and may still). Again, I run the risk of cliché here. The only reason I’m still allowing it at this stage is because I think the setting is surprising. It’s a bit of a jolt every time I read it and I like that. Instead, I changed the mirrors further down to lakes, allowing the lakes to become mirrors so that the image remains consistent with the topography at that point.

The next stage of editing was about taking out anything that telegraphed what I wanted to say. So the word ‘stretched’ went, as did the whole section on glaciers. For the latter, the word ‘cool’ will suffice. So then you might ask why I allowed ‘waking to turn and turn’ to remain in, since the previous phrase says the same thing. As I’m learning from reading others, repetition can be good if it’s used in the right place. I deliberately repeat the ‘wrapping of sleep’ the ‘rolling of sleep’ and contrast it with ‘waking to turn’ and its repeat. This is the point where I’m setting up the poem and my narrator’s restlessness. I do not want to say the word ‘fear’. I simply want to set a picture of it in place. So I aim to make sleep sound like a nervous respite (‘caul’ ‘tight’) and waking worse (‘shovel’ ‘sharp edges’ ‘blind’, etc.).

Using cartographic images, the mapping of the body, gives me the freshness this poem needs, particularly in the context of my writing as I seem to be a little obsessed with night/sleep/stars. Insomnia will do that to you. So turning my eyes in a new direction, constantly turning my mind in new directions, is good. I thank geographers, and especially Adele today, for what they teach me.

Here’s the current version of today’s poem:

Studying Cartography

You stay up late
postponing the wrapping of sleep’s caul, the rolling
of sleep’s rug tight
around you, holding your eyes open against
the words your brain repeats in the night, the words you wake
to turn against, waking to turn and turn, a shovel
in the earth digging, boot firm against
the sharp edges while stars open
their blind eyes taking light years to remember
your name. The hum
of the air conditioner perfumes the air, the green
curtain descending, your body falling, falling as you walk
the map of your body, your face showing the way
things were, your legs roads into
the old city, ones tourists travelled
often. You remember the lakes, green
mirrors leading to a cool place, history
a stutter, a leaf’s shake, a foreign country always
on your to do list. But Icarus’ wings never
appealed. You were too smart
for melting wax, having studied the sun’s
raging heat in textbooks. Yet how boring
dusk becomes, smoothing the land’s contours until
the sky is tranquil. You can’t help yourself. Your head becomes
a soft pillow
on the sofa.