The Knife of Her Gaze or (The Art of Revising)
“A work is never finished, merely abandoned.”
Whenever I hear the above quote I always think of Walt Whitman, the patron saint of revisions. After publishing Leaves of Grass in 1855, he spent the next thirty-seven years revising it— culminating in at least six different versions. Some sources report their being up to nine different manuscripts. And The Walt Whitman Archive even references a “death-bed” edition.
Whitman did more than just your garden variety punctuation or line tweak. He reorganized, reformatted, and reworded. Not even the typography remained the same. The small book of a dozen verses, became, in the end, a substantial collection of 383 poems.
Whether or not the constant revising improved his work is greatly debated, just ask Galway Kinnell. But in truth, art is always being revised—if not by the artist, then by those who consume it. Like all sustenance, it becomes part of us—leaving both consumer and consumed altered in someway.
And never forget that primordial reviser whose gaze nothing escapes: time. As in the words of Gillian Welch “Time’s the revelator."
I like to think this is the ultimate role of revision, to reveal.
Below is one of my favorite Whitman revisions, not done by Whitman—but by time… and us.
“Day by day and night by night we were together—all else has long been forgotten by me…”
Which you may know as:
“We were together. I forget the rest.”
The first one might be what most expect when someone mentions poetry. The language expanded, and even a bit antiquated. For me, the second one is pure poetry: seven words that say everything.
Below is a glimpse of my revision process using the poem “Introduction“ from my collection My Father’s Hand is a Mountain Range.
Here was my original draft:
Introduction
It’s too late.
I’ve already interfered.
Trying to give you the light,
I’ve only blocked it.
These words are proof—
Shadows on a page.
Below are my editor’s response:
She noted where I was being redundant, and circled the weak words. After various reworking, I sent back my revison:
Introduction
Hoping for light
I push shadows.
I narrowed it down to the essentials. But there was still something off. My editor’s reply:
Her reply in pink, my cacography in black.
Leading to my final version:
I had whittled my original twenty-four words down to six. And to me the most important word in the piece was the last one I found: cast. Not only did it speak of throwing words out into the unknown, like a fisherman hoping to pull light out of the darkness below. But also the casting of shadows from my obscuring of the light, showing the words on the page to be the shadows they always were, and will always be. And thirdly, cast as in a spell—hinting at language’s magic ability to bring into being.
As a closing note:
Even the quote at the beginning of this article is a revision. Valéry’s original was: “In the eyes of those who anxiously seek perfection, a work is never truly completed—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned…” (Translated from the French by Rosalie Maggio). The phrase keeps going, but I dare not stress you with its laboriousness. However, over time, through the sharing and quoting of the original it was paired down to its marrow: a bare-bonedness that endures like teeth in the grass. “A work is never finished, merely….”