The Pearl

A quote from Brenda Ueland, in her book, "If You Want To Write", abook I think every writer should have as a bible for their work...

"It is like this: there are wonderfully gifted people who write alittle piece and then write it over and over again to make itperfect - absolutely, flawlessly perfect, a gem. But these peopleonly emit about a pearl a year, or in 5 years. And that is becauseof the grind, the polishing, the fear that the little literary pearlwill not be perfect and unassailable. But this is all a loss of timeand a pity. For in them there is a fountain of exuberant life andpoetry and literature and imagination, but it cannot get out becausethey are so anxiously busy polishing the gem.

And this is the point: if they kept writing NEW things freely andgenerously and with careless truth, then they would know how to fixup the pearl and make it good, in two seconds, with no work at all."



Revision... this is a topic I've seen discussed a lot in the online poetry Groups I'm involved in. Who does it? How do they do it? Should it be done?... at what point is a poem considered "done"?

Personally, I don't revise my work... and you can decide later if that's a good thing or not, hehe. Let's call it three parts inspiration and one part laziness. But I have a hard time going back over something I've already done and trying to make it "right". And I can explain my feelings about this behaviour.

To me, writing is a lot like music (and this is something I'll talk about again I'm sure among these articles). I played guitar for years in bands here in New Jersey, and I wrote music all the time. The best thing of all tho, to me, was improvising. Whether it was just getting up to jam with some guys for fun, or creating music for a song right at the moment, there was a freedom and thrill from flying by the seat of my pants that way. Sometimes it really worked, and yes, sometimes it didn't. But that was all part of learning how to create, and also learning how I worked as an artist, what my strengths and weaknesses were.

So I find I approach my writing the same way. A line or piece of a poem comes to me, and I go with it, flesh it out and get it down. Then, I either keep it if it turned out good to me, or I toss it, maybe salvage a few lines here and there for something later on. I find it really difficult to sit down and go over the whole thing again and try to edit or revise it. To me, that is like painting a picture, and then washing it. The more you work on it, the more the intensity and flavor of the feelings fades. In fact, if you keep on revising a poem and even days later still are working on it, is it even the same poem anymore? Did you lose something forever then, simply because you kept hammering at it?

I think there needs to be a freedom to art, a flow of the conciousness and heart. Words and images are chosen and felt at the moment when the inspiration is there, and yes, maybe revision could make those things clearer, but too much could also ruin the whole poem. So I'm not saying revision is a bad thing, if it's something you feel strongly about, but I think there needs to be a balance between reworking something and finally reaching a point where you can just let it go. Let's face it, sometimes bad poems are written, and there's nothing that can be done about it. No amount of revision is going to fix it. So, you cut your losses, learn from your mistakes, and move on. And this harps back to my own personal mantra of everything you write being a step forward. This includes even the bad poems. Because you can learn from your mistakes as well as from your triumphs. To someone learning to create pearls, even making a flawed pearl is still a valuable lesson.