Against Revision

"What is the longest it's taken you to write a poem?" (Tom Gammarino)

"17 years." (Tim Dyke)

--Hawai'i Book and Music Festival Q&A

 a. To look or read carefully over (written or printed matter), with a view to improvement or correction; to improve or alter (text) as a result of examination or re-examination. Also intr.with object implied.

 b. To examine or re-examine (something, esp. a law, code, plan, or the like) for the purpose of improvement or amendment; to alter so as to make more efficient, apposite, or effective.

--Oxford English Dictionary

This exchange between Tom and Tim was the second such that I heard during the Book & Music Festival this Spring. The first, at a Bamboo Ridge panel, featured writers praising revision as the most important part of the writing process. I had begun to get ornery, so I spoke up during the Tinfish event, defending (my own) lack of revision. Tim's remark is truer, perhaps, insofar as it takes a lifetime to write any of our lines of poetry and prose.

Now, this isn't to say I never revise; when I write an essay I approach, avoid, return, and rewrite often. When I write a poem, I intervene, adjust, erase, and then await the ending. If revision is a kind of thought, then it's not to be dismissed utterly. But when I write a poem, I want to inhabit the moment of writing the poem as the poem. To revise is to alter, and what I want is the unalterable moment, insofar as such a thing exists. This is the fruit of my meditation practice, but also of my years of observing my mother in her Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is a disease that cannot be revised, let alone cured. It is the nearly pure de-construction of a life. To revise one's record of that process of losing--memory, speech, the ability to walk and take care of oneself--is to suggest it can be altered. The person with Alzheimer's is being altered, but not revised. The writer, if anything, is being revised, but her words remain faithful to the process (or unraveling of), however horrible it seems.

And so I wrote what I saw into my blog. When I prepared the blog posts for publication as books, I did a lot of editing. Editing is certainly a part of revision, but less complete. As I noted when I was editing my manuscripts, grieving seems to be a form of editing, and vice versa. I took out what I thought was not of interest to potential readers. I fixed sentences so that they scanned better (yes, prose needs to scan, too). I tried for an absolute economy of thought and feeling. But I did not ever add anything to the blog posts. Nor did I re-arrange their elements. To add or re-arrange would have been to suggest that alteration was possible, that the moment was not complete in and of itself. To add would have been to create a narrative (probably), one that works toward making sense. What I wanted to do was to record non-sense, not to make a false front.

In the memory cards that have preceded and followed the two books on Alzheimer's I've tried to be true to the process of making sense of the world, without fixing it in place. Hence, each day I write an entry is a day in which I arrive at--or stumble onto--meaning. Meaning is not edifice but mandala, or sand castle. To revise is to hold onto meaning, try to make it permanent, accessible to others as container not as hourglass.

John Ashbery says that he learned to revise as he wrote. Write long enough and you know what moves to make (which is why I still encourage my young poets to revise), which will work and which not. You know which serves to spin and which to hit flat. Which balls to hit to right and which to left field. When to dunk and when to lay-up. How to change key at the right moment to keep the improvisation conversational, rather than petroglyphic (though the unreadability of the petroglyph re-introduces interpretation as a kind of improv into the equation).

So yes, on the level of the sentence, you revise, even if the computer allows you to erase the memory of those shifts and tacks across the page. The ability to move back and forth in a document on the computer means a constant forgetting exists at the center of the memory cards I write. That's part of it, perhaps what joins my obsession with memory with my obsession about forgetting. To revise inside the poem/meditation/memory card, however, is not to alter the moment, but usually to replace it with another one, more apt for the occasion (and its quick flickering away). It is not to create a "good poem," though one hopes they're good enough, like many mothers. It is to make sure that the record of the moment works. Not a question of efficiency, but of haphazard stumbling into a meaning that will cohere, even as it's let go. The shifting ground of questions and answers, of difficulties and temporary solutions. Burke's situation strategy without a clear situation or strategy.

But more important to me is the sentence I wrote just up the page from here: "The writer . . . is being revised." That old visionary company of love might have tanked in the 19th century, along with the sublime ambitions of poetry. But a re-visionary company comes after Objectivism (in a poetic sense) and after disappointment, brutality, and age in the "real life" sense. When I write, I do not re-shape the world under the tremendous power of my pixellated thoughts; rather, I am re-shaped by it. As my experiences wear away at my expectations and ambitions and desire to alter the text that is my life, my writing records the process. And this may be why I find myself writing more and more lately. As my ambition to write poems wears down, my delight in recording the process of being lived (if I can put it that way) increases. Robert Frost's adage about form, that without it you're playing tennis without a net, transposes for me into a sense that without writing my life would have no form. No net to catch me. I can mend a net, but I cannot re-vise it. It alters me. Where alteration finds.

To Blog or Not to Blog

I stopped blogging this summer. Not by intention, but because I found myself working on projects that didn't lend themselves to blogging. But is that true? Certainly in the Spring, when I was writing for jacket2, the blogging model--write and edit at nearly the same time, then "publish"--was in effect, despite the sensitivity of the material, mostly having to do with Hawai`i's literary politics. So why not-blog? If there are answers, aside from the obvious--getting out of the habit (in more than one way, perhaps)--then they may have to do with questions of time more than of content. Or of how time comes to be content. (I suppose both pronunciations of that last word might apply.)

Blogging is a form that lends itself to honoring the moment as it occurs. When I made books out of my blog posts, I edited a lot out, but never added words, thoughts, exposition. There's an honesty to the present that ought not be altered through future tweaking, unless that becomes another post for another moment. In writing about my mother's condition, I found that Alzheimer's lives only in the present; to write about it otherwise felt less than honest. My problem with Alzheimer's books is more than that they are usually more about the caregiver than about the person with the illness; it's that they are retrospective. Alzheimer's is the disease that erases retrospection, not one that calls for it. My memory cards are also involved in the moment of composition, even as their obsessions are with the past, how it enters the present abruptly, sometimes overwhelming it. These decayed epiphanies comes as much out of forgetting as they do remembering. If your muse forgets, then allowing for those absences of language, event, affect, all matter, even if they are located in the immaterial gaps between sentences. A conceptual Garrett Stewart thesis applies, where it's not the sounds of the words that elide, meaning more than two separate words can. The gaps, whether in blogging or in writing memory cards, create meaning when two moments come together in space, if not time. This is a bit like Ron Silliman's idea of torque, except it de-emphasizes parataxis in favor of conjunctions between seemingly unattached elements.

This summer's projects developed otherwise. One, editing a posthumous collection of poetry by Steve Shrader, a poet who lived for over three decades in Waimānalo, writing amazing, Ashberyesque poems near the end of his life in 2007, turned into a sleuthing project. Shrader, famous among his friends for the precision of his work as a graphic designer, artist, and photographer, left no indication (except one date at the end of a single poem) as to when he had written these pieces. Wanting to find out when and where he wrote the poems, I began driving around O`ahu, talking to his friends, looking at places where he'd lived and worked, trying to reconstruct a time frame. What I found were people summoning up the past--one friend of Shrader's wrote afterward to say that our visit had stirred up his memories, his anger at his friend's leaving him--into a present that doesn't yet exist, that of the poems set inside the covers of a book. Research is what comes between. I could have blogged about that process, but his friends were talking to me, not into a public space that they will enter only much later. While I often want to tell my students that their ethical stipulations about using others' voices are too strong, provide cover narratives for anxieties having little to do with their subject, in this case, I wanted to give these voices their privacy. At least for now.

The second project was to put together an anthology of poetry (and some prose) by white poets in Hawai`i. (I'm calling them Euro-American, because that emphasizes an ethnic, historical background to whiteness.) There's a tenderness to that topic (as in a bruise that's easily poked) that made me want to weigh every word before I set it down, or after I set it down, then threw it across the room like a pitch by a closer with two men on and no outs in the 9th inning. Considering the colonial history of this place, to use a verb like "discover," even when it means "I've discovered where I want to live," can be problematic. There's a reason why we no longer celebrate "Discoverers' Day" in Hawai`i. Tone was an issue, too. The rhetoric (mine and the contributors') could not be angry, needed to be even, fair, self-reflexive. But it also needed to be honest. So the work of balancing flashes of frustration with a sense of our moving toward a constructive goal--alerting readers to the fact that a lot of really good white writers have written in and about Hawai`i, and that their work has been shaped in myriad ways by their experiences of living here--was not easy. While the Shrader project ostensibly recovers a past for readers of poetry inside and outside Hawai`i, as well as showing how radically different traditions can be joined together, the anthology is future-directed. My utopian goal (by now I know it's good to have them, but not to fret too much over the disappointments of not arriving) is to shift the direction of local and Hawai`i writing, to make it--counter-intuitively, considering the limitations of ethnic categories--more open. The projects do come together as a vision of what might be added to Hawai`i's literature. My phrase for this act of editing something into the world is "positive critique." But the time sense involved in these two projects moves in different directions: we look to the past in order to map possible futures. The present, or what might otherwise be blogged, is less crucial to these projects than was the work on Alzheimer's.

The anthology is now with our designer, Allison Hanabusa (who mercifully, perhaps, doesn't fit our category); the Shrader volume will get going quickly once we have the digital copies of his poems. And then there are chapbooks by Ya-Wen Ho and Erin Yuasa to do, and a book by Lehua Taitano. So Tinfish is busy, and the blog is back. I'm hoping to blog about my teaching this semester, along with whatever else comes up that lives inside the moment of considering it.

Life Writing / Life Editing / A Photo Album

I've been putting the second volume of Dementia Blog together. Different from the first--this book will not run backwards, the formal choices are more various, there will be another title--it is still a work of accretion. Hence my primary job is to cut, pare down, edit, take out. As my method was to write in the present, rather than to wait for distance to parse events, weigh and sift them (and so to alter them), the act of editing is frightening. Not as frightening as Lian Lederman's removal of photos from her design drafts of Sarith Peou's Corpse Watching, which felt to her like a formal re-enactment of genocide, but scary nonetheless. The cuts are not to words, commas, periods, the material of the sentence, but to (the) life itself. Or so it feels. Even when the cut is to a section about traveling toward the book's subject--moving from Honolulu to Virginia in an airplane, within its forced community of souls--rather than about its subject, the ("paper") cut bleeds a bit.


My blurb for Memory Wing, by Bill Lavender: "The poet's mother lives, dies in an Alzheimer's wing. The poet takes wing, remembering more because his mother remembers so little. He takes his past—and some of hers—under his wing. There is no waiting in the wings here; everything's laid out on memory's stage, surreal as the Roman memory exercises ordained. The poet may be left wing, but he steps out from under the wing of Arkansas, Blake-light tragedy, and Dante, into the elegiac present, where parents cede to children and in all their dreams come responsibilities and evasions. The OED's 12^th definition best defines wing as ”part of a spectral line where the intensity tails off to nothing at either side of it,” but that fails to describe the utter intensity of the flight between points in Bill Lavender's book. This non-fiction epic poem flies through past, present, and hallucinated futures at the speed of unpunctuated sound."


If a parent's Alzheimer's perversely activates memory in a child (adult) who retains it, then editing memory is a process of deliberate erasure, if not for the author, then for the reader. A pre-forgetting. It's the silence that was not there then. My mother's silences covered her strongest emotions. Anger, mostly, but also grief. Another family member does not (cannot?) say a word or phrase to mark her passing. This editing of the transcript that is my life-script pains me, though I know better than to expect words, sound, acknowledgment. Repression is a form of proleptic editing. If I will not say it, it will not have happened. It cannot hurt if I don't say it.


The power of acknowledgment and its obverse, the power of refusing or failing to acknowledge. Love may not be blind, but power is. Sensing a failure to control events, one refuses to acknowledge their power, and that replaces control with an imitation of it. If the imagined bear scares the child, T.S. Eliot quotes Bradley as writing, then her feeling depends not a whit on whether or not the bear is real. Now we have terrorists to fill that need.


Aaron Belz posts a quote about "fighting for joy" on his facebook page, his blog. I quarrel with the word "fighting," if not his sense that green shoots erupt from stumps, that it's crucial they come from there. We cannot get to joy through editing in advance, must edit after the fact, then grieve what has been (necessarily) lost from our manuscript. Gardeners are the fiercest of editors. "I kill things all the time," said Gaye Chan of her garden. Wanting to detach myself from the language of "fighting" and "killing," I wonder how to reconceive of editing as an activity that makes spaces rather than takes them.


The OED's 12th definition of "wing" contains the word "intensity." Intensities between empty spaces. Life-editing accentuates these intensities, while acknowledging the power of the spaces before and after. Leaving a rest between intensities amplifies them.


Editing as training for grieving. (Brenda Iijima mentioned Scalapino's gerunds yesterday.) I put poems in order to make a journal issue or to form a book. Yesterday I put black and white photographs of my mother in an album. They're from the 1940s and 1950s. Some of the photographs have penciled notes on the back, like "Rome" or like "this is where I work," but I do not know the chronology of my mother's life well enough to place the photographs "in order." They are the pictorial equivalent of new sentences, discrete (or in batches--there are a slew of photographs of Al Jolson as a white man eating lunch, lighting my mother's cigarette), set apart from each other physically, emotionally.


My mother stands in a graveyard; the graves are freshly dug, crosses are propped behind them against a wall. She is looking at the graves with a couple of men in uniform. In another photograph one of the men has his arm around my mother; both of them smile for the camera, graves still open behind them. A tiny photograph of a brick building. In front of it is a tent, men carrying two by fours, a large metal container. The tent is only partially open. On the back, in handwriting not my mother's, but signed with her nickname: "THE ARMY AND THEIR SILLY IDEAS. ANYONE KNOWS THAT THERE'S NO DANGER OF FIRE IN CLEANING STOVES, BUT WE'VE GOTTA CLEAN THEM IN A TENT." --SMOKEY


I can edit my life with some authority; hers remains mysterious, even if that WAS her voice on the back of a nondescript photograph of men standing beside a tent beside a brick building.


At Bookends in Kailua the other day I noticed a clutch of small red-covered books, pages edged in cheap gold leaf. None of these volumes contained a copyright page or listed a publisher's name, but each purported to offer the best of a great poet's work. There was one devoted to Wordsworth, yes, but the book that caught my attention was one that collected the best of Shelly [sic]. Ah, bird on wing thou never wert!

Editing as collage: Tinfish 19 in the making

Given the right manuscript (complete) and the right designer, Tinfish can publish a book promptly; such was the case with Paul Naylor's new Jammed Transmission. I could say more about the way in which the design's strengths bring out those of that text, but for now would like to think about putting together our annual journal issue. We're up to 19 issues, not including the half-issue that turned into a book, namely 18.5. While we never announce theme issues, #18 turned into a long poem issue, and so was relatively easy to put together. Non-themed issues that develop themes; non-coordinated art and poetry that coordinate; poets who don't know each other locked (sometimes happily) in conversations they would not otherwise have--these, along with the recycled materials used to create our covers, are what I think of as signatures of Tinfish's journal. Accident and randomness cohering into a "still yet moving" anthology (to wrench Hart Crane's bridge utterly out of context), that is what we do. Cohering and yet not necessarily coherent, suggesting and yet not insisting, these are our trajectories.

There are many ways to organize accidental anthologies of poems; some editors place poems in alphabetical order, by poets' last names. This is an arbitrary and in many ways unsatisfying means of conveyance, although it does allow poems to stand on their own, not infect one another with the editor's machinations. I will confess that Tinfish's agenda is very much on my mind as I put together sequences of poems by poets as different as Emelihter Kihleng and Daniel Tiffany, Kenny Tanemura and Mandy Luo. As my assistant editor for this issue, Jade Sunouchi, remarked, this issue is "weird"--so are many of them. Part of this weirdness comes out of the difficulty in finding conversations between poets. Take Kihleng, whose Tinfish 19 poem is a Haunani-Kay Trask-like anti-tourist screed, and Tiffany, whose selections from a longer piece use Middle English lyrics to generate songs in our vernacular. Sit with these poems a while and you realize they do talk to each other. Here is the end of the Tiffany excerpt from our next issue:

I am for wowing al forwake
Lest any reve me my make
Eyes shining through
Like she was
Who-whooin somebody
Leave us all alone

which is to be followed by Kihleng's Don't come to my island, which includes these lines:

and if I, a native of this island, still haven't convinced you
really, you don't want to come
it's so hot and humid
simply miserable it is

In his note, Tiffany tells the reader that the Middle English passages come from a volume that attacked the use of the vernacular; he is appropriating its quotations toward a more positive purpose, the creation of a poem many centuries later that celebrates the vernacular--its and ours. Kihleng also celebrates the vernacular in her attack on "the Mexican woman from Texas" (an unexpected imperial tourist):

the island is surrounded by mangrove swamp
or naniak, we call it
naniak full of elimoang
mehn wai who come to visit
are fond of eating these giant mangrove crabs
(but the crabs alone shouldn't make one want to travel all that distance)
they don't taste that good

Kihleng distances herself from the tourist even as she sarcastically agrees with her that things just aren't that tasty or beautiful on the island. But to anyone with an ear for local language, she is also celebrating its powers to name, to claim, to distinguish between speaker and listener, if that listener is not listening or cannot understand the words.

The poem that will follow Kihleng's, Jill Yamasawa's The Kona Coast, invokes a different kind of conversation, one between a Micronesian writer and a writer from the Big Island. In this poem, Yamasawa takes material off a Kona resort's website and lineates it as "free verse." With a deft use of italics, not found in the original (or so I'm presuming, as I have some trouble "navigating" it), Yamasawa casts doubt on the seeming reverence of the resort's PR:

Hokuli`a reflects the same reverence
to the Island of Hawai`i's historical
and cultural legacy,
clearly embracing the native saying,
Nui ke aloha no ka`aina
(Our love for the land
is without limits).

The italics here are not used to mark the Hawaiian saying (as words from a "foreign" language); they are used as scare quotes to mark precisely the lack of clarity in the relationship between resort and the `aina, or land.

In this sequence of three poems from the many in our forthcoming issue, I've tried to do several things at once. I've tried to create contexts out of juxtapositions that suggest the opposite of context. Middle English lyrics and Kihleng's angry anti-tourist words hardly form what we might call a "natural" context. Yet I would argue that there is context, that even as Tiffany's words (through their sound and their hidden context, in a history that is lost to most of us) mitigate the roughness of Kihleng's, they participate in a move into the vernacular, away from the standard American English that characterizes most of the work in the issue. The move from Kihleng to Yamasawa is more direct, and yet their methods are different. Yamasawa damns the resort simply by parroting its PR; Kihleng turns tourist rhetoric on its head by seeming to agree with the tourist that her island is nothing to pay a steep airfare to visit.

I make such sequences knowing full well that I have added my voice into the mix, a voice that is different in many ways from those of the authors whose work I am organizing, putting in sequence, asking to talk. What I hope is that our readers realize that they too have the power to play with the poems, either by leaving each be on its own, or by reading them in a different order (or dis-). I am reminded of the Cortazar novel whose title I can't remember that included a key in the back to all the many different ways you could read the book, switching chapters around. [Editor's note: must have been this one.] This was before the age of the computer, when such playfulness comes without saying. Yet Tinfish is resolutely a paper production, so it's harder to rearrange our intentions (or even our lacks thereof, since we thrive on accidents). The editor's job is to quote, but to quote out of one context and into another. It's one reason I love the job more than I ever imagined I would. Editing is "writing" in the way that collage is. And collage is a form of appropriation that is always aware of itself as such, ever attempting to undercut (sometimes with scissors!) its own authority.

Other conversations we discovered as we leafed through "accepted" poems: Kenny Tanemura's "On Mao's Indigestion" with Mandy Luo's "The Silk Road" (h/t to Jade on that one); Yamasawa and Gajelonia on Wallace Stevens, Gajelonia and Oishi on TheBus; Janna Plant, Barbara Jane Reyes, Jody Arthur and others on oral traditions and mythologies from the Bible to Samoa; Oscar Bermeo and Deborah Woodard on landlords; Paul Naylor on place and parenthood; Michael McPherson in a good-bye (he died this past year).

The verbal material of the issue has not yet been successfully transferred to a designer (though I did fail miserably at the file transfers last evening). Chae Ho Lee will do the graphic design. Maya Portner is making the covers, and another artist will be doing a centerfold. The final issue will have both centrifugal and coherent force to it; centrifugal because ideas and images will be flying outward unpredictably, coherent because we do not want to escape the force of our limitations. We are not the resort, claiming its own lack of limits by quoting from a Hawaiian saying (and thereby attempting control over its words). And so there is a lack of ambition in all this, as well. We do not aim to cover a territory (bad metaphor, that!) but to open up the torqued and untorqued spaces of the poems we publish. That said, these journal issues involve the most labor of any of our publications. The covers (500 0f them) are hand-made and then stapled onto the books. Many hands are involved, from mine and Jade's to Gaye Chan's, a graphic designer, an artist (or two or three). When I get complaints that our issues cost good money, I think of all these unpaid hands, to say nothing of the costs of distribution, mailing, advertising, and so on.