When I was working at Creative Writing News in 2019, I reached out to six Nigerian poets to ask them how they go about editing their work. Pamilerin Jacob, Wale Ayinla, and JK Anowe were some of those I spoke to. Recently, while thinking about this piece, I went back over the Google Doc containing their responses. For several of them, the process is not neat (Anowe: “I am not sure there is [a process to editing], at least not in the conventional sense”); there is no formula.
“Editing is more difficult than writing,” I thought of saying. But (thinking again) I think that statement is false. Within the past month, I have wept because I could not write a poem. I could feel the presence of the poem; I was aware that it was around—I had a living phrase. I wrote the first few words and I was at a dead end. There are times when putting the words down are way more difficult than setting them right. (In times like that I think of Geoffrey Hill’s “God’s Little Mountain”: “And I was shut | With wads of sound into a sudden quiet”; “For though the head frames words the tongue has none. | And who will prove the surgeon to this stone?”)
Another way to look at it is: Writing is rewriting and to rewrite is to edit. We are not writers, as they say; we are re-writers. No good book is ever simply written—even bad books are touched. Hill saw this process of rewriting / editing as “an act of penance.” Here, from a sermon he gave at Saint John’s Chapel, Cambridge, he makes the point: “I believe that we are radically at fault the moment we open our mouths, and that language is a labyrinth wherein is manifested, clause by clause, the actuality of original sin. The afflicted writer’s act of penance is revealed by her succession of half-erased phrases and barely legible substitutions in manuscript. Her ruination of innumerable virgin pages to achieve the shaping of a sermon that will last no more than fifteen minutes . . .”
The idea of editing as penance is fundamental. We are trying to correct some flaw in our language-acts when we rewrite or edit; we are trying to atone for some grammatical, rhythmic, syntactic, or phrasal sin. It also means that the task demands that we go against our defensive and self-protecting inclinations. Lastly, it is arduous and tasking to edit, like all penances.
There are no formulas; the methods are arbitrary—they depend on the weather sometimes. We can try to work with questions, however, so we don’t stray too far. One: What are we editing for (as in “what are we looking for?”; or, to borrow Okigbo’s phrase, “What are we ‘casting about for’ when we edit?”)? Two: What are we not editing for?
To start with the second question: We don’t edit for ideological, cultural, logical or factual coherence.
“Beware any poet when he or she revises on the grounds of moral integrity.”
In a discussion on Yeats’s revisions, Geoffrey Hill was asked what he thought of poets reediting their early work years later. Hill responded: “I can think, off the top of my head, of two or three and all of them disastrous.” Marianne Moore, her poem “Poetry”; W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”; and John Crowe Ransom who reedited his early poetry books in his later years.
Auden corrected a famous line in his poem, because he felt it was a stupid line. “We must love one another or die” became “We must love one another and die” (my emphases). As Hill noted, the original version is better, since the death implied is a spiritual death, not a physical one. He corrected the “or” to “and” because he thought it was more correct to the fact of things as they appear—we love and yet we die (physically). The second version obviously lacks the bite of the first—the change diminishes the weight of each of the words in the line.
Something had happened to Auden ideologically between 1939 and the mid- to late 1940s. The swell out of which he wrote, the faith or unbelievable hope that moved (within) him in that moment, had become pessimistic (perhaps in light of all the deaths). He corrected the poem to match that ideological change. As shown, it did not turn out well. The same applies to Ransom, who tried to correct outdated ideas, to repent of his own sins by marring the work he had already done, and about whom Hill said, “Beware any poet when he or she revises on the grounds of moral integrity.”
Moore, on the other hand, cut down a full poem that makes “a place for the genuine” into two lines, making it epigrammatic, no better than an aphorism; cutting out “the genuine.” I have no idea why.
The examples I have used are of poets who tried to edit for ideological coherence after many, many years. But the principle applies even when you are editing within months. It is dangerous to edit to bend your work to any belief you have, even religious beliefs. I am a Christian, but I write poems against the Scripture, and I try to be alert to the danger of correcting my work to make it more Christian. Your faith, your culture, your ideology, the fact of your life have to be subjected to the language itself. The poem takes every thought captive and releases it into new life.
We know this, but it is important to emphasize it. Editing is about finding solutions to problems (which sometimes take us a while to know). Our solutions must be original solutions, not preconceived, or premeditated solutions, or we shall have failed. When we edit, the “self” (where every other thing I have mentioned above is lodged) always tries to give us an easy way out. It is always trying to get in the way of an original solution. So it calls our attention to our beliefs, personal history, previous poems that we have written and how we solved the particular problems that arose in them: all of which are traps.
I mentioned the fact that we have no duty to be faithful to the facts as they occurred. Auden said a poet gets at truth by “the luck of verbal playing” (and he failed to accept his luck); we fabricate our way to the truth. In drafting, we may have a certain notion in mind (possibly, your heart just got broken and you are weeping in words: bad idea but I understand). In editing, we do not owe that notion faithfulness. The farther you stray from the fact, the closer you are to the truth.
I would say—Edit against yourself (and against all that is involved with yourself).
“A word is exciting because of its surroundings.”
Question one: What do we edit for?
If we don’t edit to make the poem read like something we can nod our heads to, what do we edit for?
We edit for poetry.
A poem is a way of achieving poetry. The amount of poetry in a poem determines its quality.
When a draft has any worth, it means that there are glints of poetry in it. What we want to do is to take out everything that is not poetry in it and to position language—by moving words about, taking some out and bringing others in, by changing the shape of stanzas—in order to be able to achieve poetry. We want to get in as much of poetry as we possibly can into a single poem.
How do we get poetry in as we edit?
W. S. Graham: “A poem is made of words” and “A word is exciting because of its surroundings.”
Are the words right? Are the words that are next to them also right? Are they right together?
Every word is a decent creature; the strength of a word is wholly dependent on who is standing next to it. Graham’s poem “Approaches to How They Behave” demonstrates this poetically.
“Flamboyant eyes” is a terrible phrase; “rigorous eyes” is a much better phrase. “Lambent laughter” (ignore the meaning) is a bad phrase; “Loaded laughter” is a better phrase.
Why? First, “flamboyant eyes” is an extravagant phrase. Two, the soft consonants in “flamboyant” provide no buttress for the “eye”; “rigorous” has enough, especially “go.” Similarly, “lambent laughter” is too loose a phrase, there is no bump inside the words (the “b” in “lambent” and the “t” do very little). But we have a ridge in “loaded,” which cautions the looseness of “laughter.”
Why is this important? The language of poetry has to embody reality; it has to “body forth.” One way it manages this is through sound and words. The sounds and words of poetry do a mimetic work; to do this, they must have a physical quality about them. When I edit, this is one of the key things I am after. When we arrange words for sound-quality, we are positioning for poetry.
I took a look at the facsimile of The Waste Land—the section “A Game of Chess.” In the first draft, line three (of this section) has the phrase “golden vines.” In the printed version, we have “fruited vines.” Small change, but “golden” is much more extravagant and unnatural than “fruited.” “Golden vines” sounds like something out of Keats’s “Endymion,” immature, dreamy. Eliot corrected that one word to ground the poem and to provide good measure.
Lines 21—24 show another crucial aspect to consider when editing poetry: Immediacy. In drafts, we tend to describe, because we are working our way to the image. But, as Pound said, we are not to describe images, we are to “present” them. An image appears. When we edit, we are trying to make things appear—rather than bringing them to people. (To better understand what I mean by “An image appears,” please see Jean-Luc Marion’s “What We See and What Appears” in Idol Anxiety, edited by Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhalf.)
The first draft of the lines I mentioned reads thus:
“Above the antique mantel was displayed
In pigment, but so lively, you had thought
A window gave upon the sylvan scene,
The change of Philomel . . .”
Pound wrote next to this lines: “the weakest point” and he circled “you had thought.” The phrase negates the immediacy of the image, rather than letting it appear, it asks the reader (“you”) to conceive it.
In the new draft, we see mastery:
“Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel.”
Something dramatic has taken place in this version. The image is not told, it is syntactically dramatized. A line has been cut and the line (“As though a window . . .”) has come up to delay the part of the sentence that the syntax is headed for: “The change of Philomel.” The window, in other words, “[gives] upon the sylvan scene”—the line opens onto and casts a light on “The change of Philomel.” But the key thing is that the distance between the thing and the communication of the thing has been shortened, and without any loss. What happens on the page, happens also in our reading of the poem—we don’t have to cover a long distance in our thinking to reach the image (I am paraphrasing Charles Williams). Or, as Eliot said elsewhere, the image communicates before it is understood. The thing simply appears, as if a painting on a wall.
That kind of immediacy is one thing we are reaching for when we edit.
There is tone and pitch of voice. Vivien Eliot made a genius edit on the last few lines of this section. In the first draft, there is a line that reads: “It’s that medicine I took, in order to bring it off.” It became: “It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.”
Such a great change—a mile of difference between “that medicine” and “them pills.” The first sounds cold and dry. There is a liveliness, a worldliness (?), in “them pills.”
One listens out for these things. One is trying to get the right tone, the right pitch; put words in exciting environments; trying to play; trying to move things around until they click.
Let me leave it here. I have to go and have my bath; I have been at this for hours.
Please check out the other notes here: “No 1”; “No 2”; “No 3”; “No 4.”
“The idea of editing as penance is fundamental.”
Before I go, I am currently open for editing jobs. If you have a poetry or prose manuscript that you need a fresh pair of eyes on, send me an email: ogunyemiernest@gmail.com. (I will charge but not for the weight of your sins. No one can pay for what their sins are worth.)
Keep well. Thank you for reading. 🔹
Undeniably needed. Thank you.
We are re-writers, hmm