Friday, May 27, 2005

comments on "The Man in the Pinstriped Suit", version 2

This is not a major revision. I like that. I'm glad I decided to post a poem on this blog that seemed pretty much done.

What I've been doing up to now has been challenge myself, assign myself a poem that really needed help, a poem that was only going to be done on the other side of a long process, a process that I couldn't see into, could only find my way through with a machete and blind reckoning.

For a long time I didn't have the motivation to do serious revision, the kind of revision that requires the idea that someone wants the poem, wants whatever it's going to be after its troublesome development.

When a poem is a revelation, when it seems to rise up out of emptiness, when it's exciting and brings all its own energy, I can say it doesn't matter whether anyone wants the poem -- there it is!

Here it is, only slightly different from the way it's been for the last 20 years on the page of a booklet of writings from a high school creative writing class.

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